Tag: Behavioral Psychology

Research Assistant III: Work with Professors Eyal, Hammitt, Freedberg, Kuritzkes, and collaborators on HIV cure studies’ risks, risk perceptions, and ethics

Nir Eyal Leave a comment

The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory to predict risks in early-phase HIV cure studies, assess how much likely candidates for participation understand those risks, and make ethical recommendations on the conduct of HIV cure studies.

The research assistant will help prepare, conduct and analyze a pilot survey expected to take place in a US site of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). The survey will assess perceptions of HIV cure and of cure study risks. The research assistant will also promote other research and grant-related activities, through literature reviews and assistance in the preparation of abstract, poster, and manuscripts for publication, grant applications, a simple project website (using Harvard’s user-friendly OpenScholar platform), and slides for lectures and seminars. The research assistant will be in touch with top researchers in HIV cure, medical decision making, and ethics from around the country, to facilitate our meetings, a workshop, and regular conversations to plan the research and debate ethical issues around early-phase HIV cure studies.

For the full job ad:
https://jobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?partnerID=25240&siteID=5341&AReq=33776BR

Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA): Thursday, April 17th: Critch on Aversion Factoring & Career Choice

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A communication from Harvard Effective Altruism:

Aversion Factoring & Career Choice

with Dr. Andrew Critch

Thursday, April 17th 7-8:30 PM

Emerson 305

We often limit ourselves by avoiding things we find bothersome or scary.  But for almost anything you find bothersome, there’s someone out there who doesn’t!  How does that work?  Can you copy their enjoyment-powers?  If so, you have many more options for growth, career choice, and general do-gooding.  This presentation is based around a technique Dr. Critch teaches at the Center for Applied Rationality for using aversions as a source of creativity, and then getting over them.

Dr. Critch’s interest in rationality began as a teenager growing up in Newfoundland, Canada, where he says he “just had a lot of time to think about it”. When he was 14, he made his first attempt to extrapolate his instinctive preferences into a function whose expected integral he wanted to maximize. (In college he found out that some economists had been crazy enough to think humans worked this way automatically). He also won numerous national awards in mathematics and public-speaking competitions.

 

Saturday, April 5th: Aid Grade! (from Harvard Effective Altruism)

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A communication from Harvard Effective Altruism:

 

Hi altruists,

Saturday, April 5th is a big day for EA at Harvard: we have three different awesome events for you! Our guest for the day, flying up from DC for the occasion, will be Dr. Eva Vivalt, the founder of AidGrade. AidGrade helps figure out what works in international development by doing rigorous and engaging analyses of different interventions to find out their effects. They’re also looking for interns and full-time hires for this work, so please visit if you’re interested!

We’ll be having a talk on AidGrade’s research from 1-2pm, followed by a research-a-thon from 2-6 where we help AidGrade do some meta-analysis. The day will be topped off by a Boston-area effective altruism meetup at Clover–with another special guest, Jacob Trefethen of 80,000 Hours Cambridge UK, and many awesome local effective altruists.

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Harvard Effective Altruism: Josh Greene this Tuesday

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Emotion, Reason and Altruism
with Professor Joshua Greene

Tuesday, March 11th, 7 PM,
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
Why do people have radically different opinions as to who to help and how? How can we get along with people who seem to fundamentally disagree with us about what to want? Professor Josh Greene addresses this and more in Emotion, Reason, and Altruism.
Joshua Greene direct Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting edge cognitive neuroscience techniques to study how people actually make moral decisions, integrating thinking from philosophy, social science, and social psychology to address questions of why people disagree as much as they do, and what we can do about it.