The Ada Lovelace Institute (Ada) is hiring a Visiting Senior Researcher to lead a research project at Ada: to monitor the international deployment and use of Covid technologies such as vaccine passports and contact tracing apps, and to describe their legacy as we move towards the late-stage pandemic and beyond. This is a major project for the organisation, given the seeming permanency of measures that were initially planned only as public health emergency responses. 

The role

The role of Visiting Senior Researcher provides an excellent opportunity for a mid-career scholar to craft and execute a research agenda on in a dynamic and energetic policy-facing organisation.

This position will lead our work on Covid technologies, building on 18 months of research on contact tracing, ‘vaccine passports’ and public attitudes to data use in the pandemic. It is a new position created as part of our strategy, which organises the research under five programmatic priorities: the future of regulation; ethics in practice; public sector algorithms; biometrics; and health and covid. This researcher will lead a project to monitor the use of covid passports and related technologies beyond the pandemic, exploring international approach, politics, governance, public attitudes and technical models. This will involve mapping emerging and ongoing uses of vaccine passports, extending our already existing international Covid monitor and building evidence of lessons to be learned from the deployment of these tools. The research will also examine the legacy of these technologies on society, whether they normalise health surveillance, or create or expand digital ID systems for example. The research project is an opportunity to build and synthesise Ada’s work on the role of technologies in society, governance mechanisms for the use of health and non-health data and transparency mechanisms that engage public attitudes and experiences of technologies.

The Visiting Senior Researcher will work closely with the Senior Researcher for Health and Covid Technologies who is leading work in this programme across the organisation. The role is a policy-focused researcher role. It will present ongoing opportunities to work with the Public Engagement, Communications and Policy teams at Ada, to engage and gather evidence from external stakeholders including members of the public across UK and Europe, to influence future thinking around societal impacts of vaccine passports during and beyond the pandemic. The researcher will be responsible for communication strategies for outputs, and conceptualising, facilitating and attending meetings, workshops and events with a view to achieving strategic impact.

Ada’s methodologies include the use of working groups and expert convenings, public deliberation initiatives, desk-based research and synthesis, policy and legal analysis and translation, and ethnographic research. We welcome new kinds of expertise and methodologies into our team. We prioritise outputs that are aimed at engaging different publics and do not generally produce academic publications so the researcher will need to marry technical credibility with compelling framing arguments. The Visiting Senior Researcher is expected to produce and execute a novel, achievable, and high-impact research agenda, with international reach beyond the UK.

About you

You may have a background researching for an academic organisation, policy department or a regulator, a tech company, research institute or charity. You may have a university degree, or have gained experience from an apprenticeship or trainee programme at a research, policy, private-sector or civil-society. You are curious and passionate about the issues which arise at the intersection of technology and society, and are committed to bringing an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens to understanding them. Importantly, you’ll be comfortable taking initiative, working independently and to short deadlines at times.

You’ll enjoy working in a team environment, willing to jump into projects and keen to explore areas of policy, technology and practice that you don’t already understand. You’ll appreciate the importance of exceptionally high standards of rigour in research, but also want to think creatively about communicating and influencing in novel ways.

For further information about the role, please click here to download the full job description. 

How to apply 

The closing date for applications is 09:00am (GMT) on Thursday 25th November 2021, with interviews taking place via video the w/c 6th December 2021.  

You will be required to complete some questions as part of this application process, and you are also required to upload an up-to-date copy of your CV. The Applied platform lets you save an application and resume it ahead of submitting before the application deadline. 

We strongly encourage applicants from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the research, policy and technology sectors (for example those from a marginalised community, who did not go to university or had free school meals as a child). We are committed to tackling societal injustice and inequality through our work, and believe that all kinds of experiences and backgrounds can contribute to this mission. 

The Ada Lovelace Institute 

The Ada Lovelace Institute is an independent research institute funded and incubated by the Nuffield Foundation in 2018. Our mission is to ensure data and artificial intelligence work for people and society. We do this by building evidence and fostering rigorous debate on how data and AI affect people and society.  We recognise the power asymmetries that exist in ethical and legal debates around the development of data-driven technologies and seek to level those asymmetries by convening diverse voices and creating a shared understanding of the ethical issues arising from data and AI. Finally, we seek to define and inform good practice in the design and deployment of AI technologies.   

After little more than two years of operation, the Institute has emerged as a leading independent voice on the ethical and societal impacts of data and AI. We have built relationships in the public, private and civil society sectors in the UK and internationally. Some of our most impactful work to date includes our rapid evidence review on contact tracing apps, Exit Through the App Store?, and our public attitudes survey on facial recognition, Beyond Face Value.   

Our research takes an interconnected approach to issues such as power, social justice, distributional impact and climate change (read our strategy to find out more), and our team have a wide range of expertise that cuts across policy, technology, academia, industry, law and human rights.  We value diversity in background, skills, perspectives, and life experiences. As part of the Nuffield Foundation, we are a small team with the practical support of an established organisation that cares for its employees.    

We aim to be a collaborative, welcome and informal place to work. We are currently a 16-person team and have returned to some in-person working in our London offices but are open to hybrid working patterns.