Postdoctoral Scholar, Community Health Science

Description

Area:
Research Impact and Assessment

Duration:
12 months

Start Date:

March 23, 2026 to March 22, 2027

Salary: ( 60,195 + Plan C health benefits to a total of ~ 69,589)

The Department of Community Health Science in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary is accepting applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar in Impact and assessment.

This posting provides an opportunity to join the new Research and Innovation Assessment Lab (RIIAL) at the University of Calgary. The Lab has four strategic impact pillars:

• Conduct research on research
• Apply the research in practice;
  Build impact capacity and skills
• Foster a national and international Network
• A partnership and transdisciplinary team approach engages researchers, funders, policy makers, philanthropy etc. to advance the science and practice of impact.

If you see yourself as having an entrepreneurial mindset, are creative and want a career as an impact professional this is role for you. The benefits of this unique post‑doc is that you will be trained in the competencies of an impact professional that offers you broad career options. You will receive hands on specialized training, access to international experts and provided with practical experience and tools to enhance and assess impact.

The focus of this role is conducting research on impact and assessment related projects.

• Conducting Research on Research Use to Enhance Impact:
  Apply a realist approach to understand funder policies, strategies and practices that influence impact‑oriented research use using a realist‑informed case study design, focusing on relational pathways between actions, the conditions created for researchers and other actors, the mechanism by which research outputs are disseminated and used, and the outcomes/impacts that follow. The intent is to distinguish common pathways from those that are context‑specific and then use these insights to co‑create a research agenda for impact.
  
  This work involves workshop facilitation and broad interest‑holder engagement. Outputs include working papers, publications, policy briefs, attending a conference.
• Conducting Research on Research to Enhance Children Health Outcomes:
  Using a realist approach, support research on the latest evidence for enhancing equitable children’s outcomes and impacts as well as assessing impact. Support research on the underlying conditions and success factors for pathways to outcomes and investigate whether there are established predictor and tipping point variables along the pathways? Understand the different relational pathways to getting to outcomes that includes an analysis of who has been engaged throughout the research to action lifecycle process.
  
  Investigate decision making tools and rubrics that are used when designing grand challenge initiatives as well as exploring the use of AI‑enabled tools.
• Other projects include co‑developing impact narratives, supporting workshop facilitation and delivering impact training as well as participating in national and international communities of practice.

• Completed Ph.D. ideally in Health, Social Sciences and Humanities, Interdisciplinary and/or Transdisciplinary research or another relevant area
• A strong qualitative research methods background (e.g. conducting case studies, social network analysis, observational studies etc.)
• Experience in applying realist approaches (e.g. realist synthesis, realist evaluations etc.)
• Experience in using qualitative software applications (e.g. ATLAS.ti, NVivo, etc.)

The deadline for submitting applications is March 16th.

The terms and conditions of employment are covered under the UCalgary and PDAC Collective Agreement. To find out more about postdoctoral scholar program at the University of Calgary visit our Postdocs website.

To learn more about postdoctoral scholar opportunities at the University of Calgary, view our Postdoc Careers website.

As an equitable and inclusive employer, the University of Calgary recognizes that a diverse staff/faculty benefits and enriches the work, learning and research experiences of the entire campus and greater…