The network is offering 13 PhD students the opportunity to join these eight universities in exploring how genetic information can be incorporated in social science, to improve our understanding of some of the age-old questions in the social sciences:
- What are the origins of inequalities?
- To which extent is the interplay between environments and genes important in shaping life changes?
The consortium is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and spans demography, economics, epidemiology, genetics, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics, as well as seven non-academic partners experienced in and committed to using data science to better understand inequalities in life chances.
Students can apply across the 13 positions. The two positions at PROMENTA includes studentships supervised by Professor Eivind Ystrøm, leader of the genetics research group at PROMENTA, and Associate Professor Alexandra Havdahl, member of the PROMENTA research center.
The two PhD students at UiO will be working with Eivind and Alexandra’s team on integrating genetic and social science approaches to study intergenerational transmission of educational performance and school variation in genetic and environmental effects.
The goal of project 1 is to identify causal intergenerational effects on educational achievement. Novel approaches will be employed to separate parental genetic variants into those that were inherited by the child and those that were not inherited. MoBa is the largest sample of genotyped general population trio cohorts to date, affording unprecedented power to account for genetic transmission and identify causal intergenerational effects.
The goal of project 2 is to estimate heterogeneity in direct and indirect genetic effects on educational outcomes across families, neighborhood, schools, and municipalities while accounting for population stratification. The project will combine genotyped trios and whole population pedigree data to estimate grandparent genotypes. The whole-population registry data comprise demographic, economic, educational, health, place of residence and workplace data and clustering.
The ESSGN PhD fellows at UiO will use data from Norwegians since 1940 (n=8 400 000) with registries giving genealogy and year-by-year event data on place of residence, indicators of socioeconomic status (SES), and educational performance. ESSGN at UiO combines this with a population-based cohort study comprising genotyping of families (n=240 000 in 110 000 families) and a wide array of survey data. An approach combining intergenerational, temporal, locational, genetic, and individual levels of inference will allow the PhD fellows to do novel studies on the gene-environment interplay for academic outcomes.
The 13 fellowships will start in September/October 2023 with monthly allowances available. Ideal applicants hold a Master's degree in social (e.g. psychology, demography, economics, epidemiology, political science, sociology, statistics) or medical science (e.g. genetics, epigenetics). We are looking for candidates with strong quantitative skills.
Read more about the positions and apply by January 15th, 2023 here.