Department of Applied Social Sciences
Postdoctoral Fellow
(Ref. 260730015)
[Appointment period: twelve months initially, with possibility of further appointment]
Duties
The appointee will assist the project leader in the research projects - “Understanding and promoting healthy lifestyles among secondary school students” and/or “Youth development and wellbeing in the AI and digital society: A PolyU-SEU collaborative research initiative”. He/She will be required to:
(a) lead the preparation of research instruments, such as interview protocols and questionnaires;
(b) collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data;
(c) prepare reports and manuscripts;
(d) develop and evaluate digitally-mediated programmes;
(e) liaise with different organisations to support recruitment of participants;
(f) conduct research under the supervision of the project leader; and
(g) perform any other duties as assigned by the Head of Unit or his/her delegates.
Qualifications
Applicants should:
(a) have a doctoral degree, preferably in Psychology, Social Work, Public Health, Education, Computational Social Science or other related disciplines and must have no more than five years of post-qualification experience at the time of application;
(b) have a good command of both written and spoken English and Chinese, with fluency in Cantonese and Putonghua;
(c) have experience in intensive longitudinal data analysis and application of machine learning techniques to structured numerical and unstructured textual data;
(d) have a good track record of academic writing, including report writing, manuscript preparation, and proposal preparation;
(e) have strong statistical knowledge and data analysis skills;
(f) be proficient in using Python for data processing and text mining, and traditional qualitative techniques such as thematic analysis and interview coding;
(g) demonstrate competence in quantitative, qualitative and computational methods, such as inferential statistics and causal inference using statistical software such as Mplus, Stata, or R;
(h) be familiar with statistical methods including autoregressive models, structural equation modeling (SEM), dynamic SEM, psychological network analysis.;
(i) have research interests in areas such as lifestyle medicine, AI usage patterns, digitally mediated program development implementation, and evaluation in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland context;
(j) have a strong sense of responsibility and good interpersonal skills; and
(k) be a good team player and able to work independently.
Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Yu Lu via email at lu.yu@polyu.edu.hk for further information.
Conditions of Service
A highly competitive remuneration package will be offered.
Consideration of applications will commence on 14 August 2026 until the position is filled.
Posting date: 30 July 2026