Research Fellow - Climate Risk Perception & Community Behavioural Research

About the role

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Nanyang Technological University hosts the project "Building Community Resilience Against Sea-Level Rise" (Grant H2_2024-3_T10), funded by the National Parks Board (NParks) under its Marine Climate Change Science Coastal Protection (MCCS) call. The project joins CEE and the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information to combine geospatial modelling, behavioural risk-perception research, agent-based simulation and community engagement design for Singapore's coastal adaptation. The Research Fellow leads Modules A and B: baseline research on how residents and businesses perceive and respond to sea-level rise and coastal flood risk, behavioural experiments, and community archetype identification.

Key responsibilities

• Lead Module A: baseline behavioural research on risk perception, risk tolerance and adaptation readiness among residents and businesses, using surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups and behavioural experiments.
• Lead Module B: community archetype identification and mapping using latent-class methods.
• Coordinate cross-module integration of archetype outputs across the project team.
• Present findings to the project team, NParks and other agency partners, and to community stakeholders.
• Co-author the Risk Perception and Adaptation Readiness Report.
• Contribute to conference presentations and top-tier journal publications.

Required profile

• PhD in Communication Studies, Psychology, Behavioural Science, Sociology, Public Policy, Environmental Social Science, Environmental Psychology, Human Geography or a related field.
• Familiarity with environmental, climate change, sea-level rise or sustainability-related behavioural research, including risk perception, climate adaptation behaviour or science/risk communication.
• Experience designing surveys and instruments, behavioural experiments and collecting large-scale data.
• Strong spoken and written communication, including presenting findings to academic, agency and community audiences, and a track record of academic writing.
• Ability to coordinate cross-functional research teams.

Required skills

• LCA, multinomial logistic regression, SEM, factor analysis (R, Stata, SPSS, Mplus)
• In-depth interviewing, focus group facilitation and qualitative analysis (NVivo)