Event Details

Every year, across universities and academic fields, faculty search committees are faced with the task of sorting through hundreds of applicants to shortlist, interview, and eventually hire. The hiring outcomes of this process, while noisy, reveal the preferences of departments for each other’s applicants. We study these hiring outcomes in the academic labor market as a faculty hiring network in which nodes are departments and directed edges count the number of PhD from one department who are now faculty at another. Faculty hiring networks across academic fields show clear and common structure in the form of steep linear hierarchies of prestige, in which a small number of high prestige departments supply the vast majority of faculty for an entire field. Nevertheless, we find substantial heterogeneity across fields and general areas, and between outcomes for men and women. In this talk, I’ll explore key patterns in empirical faculty hiring networks, introduce generative models that attempt to desribe their structural evolution, and discuss some of the consequences and implications of their structural inequalities.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Daniel Larremore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also an affiliate of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is a member of the external faculty of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. His research develops mathematical methods using novel combinations of networks, dynamical systems, and statistical inference to solve problems in two main areas: infectious disease epidemiology and computational social science. This work focuses on generative models for networks, the ongoing evolution and genomic epidemiology of the malaria parasite, and the origins of social inequalities in academic hiring and careers. Prior to joining the University of Colorado faculty, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute 2015-2017 and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2012-2015. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012, and holds an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.