Research Assistant

Research Assistant (Temporary, Fall 2025)
Department of Earth & Environment / Computing & Data Sciences

The PLACES Lab at Boston University seeks a motivated undergraduate or graduate student to help make a major conservation study reproducible, extensible, and openly available. Supported by NASA Land Use / Land Cover Change, the study compares the impacts of payments for environmental services (PES) and land acquisitions in the Colombian Andes, integrating parcel-boundary data, novel satellite-derived land cover change products, and advanced causal inference methods. It has received encouraging peer reviews at PNAS, underscoring its significance, and will likely be published early next year.

The Research Assistant will join the NASA project to translate the existing codebase into clear, well-documented workflows that can be adapted to other geographies and similar questions. This work will feed into `openplaces`, a nascent open-source platform designed to link property-level geospatial data with environmental and satellite data globally. The student will also interact directly with (and learn from) the former PhD student who led the analysis, now a Research Associate at the World Resources Institute’s Land & Carbon Lab.

Responsibilities
•    Reorganize and document code for the Colombian PES vs. land acquisition study.
•    Build reproducible, portable workflows for integration into `openplaces`.
•    Work with parcel-boundary data, satellite-derived land cover change data, and
modern causal inference methods (staggered DID; no prior knowledge required).
•    Collaborate with PI and students to ensure output meets open-science standards.

Required Qualifications
•    Enrollment as an undergraduate or graduate student at BU
(Earth & Environment, Computing & Data Sciences, or related field).
•    Coding skills in Python (pandas, geopandas, rasterio, xarray) or R.
•    Interest in reproducible research.
•    Ability to work independently and manage complex workflows.

Preferred Qualifications (or willingness to learn)
•    Experience with geospatial data and remote sensing.
•    Familiarity with causal inference methods (e.g., difference-in-differences).
•    Interest in environmental economics, conservation policy, or land-use change.
•    Enthusiasm for contributing to a global open-science community.

Position Details
•    Term: Fall 2025 (with possibility of extension to Spring 2026).
•    Hours: 8–15 hours/week, flexible.
•    Compensation: Hourly, commensurate with student skills and BU guidelines.
•    Work mode: Hybrid; remote work possible with regular check-ins.

Application Instructions
To apply, please send the following to Associate Professor Christoph Nolte (chrnolte@bu.edu) by:
•    A brief cover letter describing your interest and relevant skills.
•    CV or résumé.
•    (Preliminary) transcripts with relevant coursework.
•    (Optional) Example of prior code or project.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please apply no later than Oct 3rd (your application doesn't have to be perfect)

If you’d like to learn more about this project, we gave a 50min NASA webinar in 2022 that you can watch: https://youtu.be/zlCO51fDF00. Ana’s part (the impact evaluation) starts at 21:50min. (Please forgive her inattentive advisor (that’s me) for not handling video feed correctly during the Zoom recording and blocking the view; you’ll see more of Ana during discussions.)