Research Director, RegLab - Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School’s budgeted salary range is: $142,192 - $195,000

Research Director, RegLab

The Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) at Stanford University is looking for a Research Director to help drive forward a diverse research program focused on public sector artificial intelligence (AI) applications and policy. We are looking for someone who has excellent technical skills, strong research expertise, good communication skills, and is motivated by the mission of the lab.

As Research Director, you will:

• Work closely with the Faculty Director and the RegLab team to drive forward a research program in natural language processing (NLP) and public sector AI.

• Lead the lab’s NLP research portfolio, supervise multiple projects with government partners, and mentor several junior research teams.

• Produce academic research papers for conference proceedings and journals as key deliverables.

Duties you’ll perform in this role:

NLP research and development

• Develop technical and methodological solutions to complex problems in public sector AI, including the design, development, and evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, large language models, and statistical methods for law, regulation, and public administration.

• Develop new or improved methods, software, and tools important to the advancement of the field, and guide advanced ideas from prototype into working systems or new research approaches.
• Lead the collection, annotation, and refinement of new text datasets, and the improvement of existing ones.
• Work with large, untapped text corpora, such as mass adjudication records, regulatory and enforcement documents, and the largest publicly available corpus of legal text.

• Research and recommend new tools, methods, and frameworks for text data ingestion, storage, and access.

Supervision of government partner projects

• Supervise multiple concurrent research and implementation projects with government partners, providing leadership and scientific expertise in planning and implementation from scoping and data acquisition through evaluation and delivery.

• Serve as a primary technical point of contact and expert consultant for partner agencies, advising on technical requirements, capabilities, and opportunities, and translating operational needs into research questions.
• Supervise staff and resources to meet program objectives, managing timelines, scope, and deliverables with project managers, lawyers, and social scientists.
• Design scalable, fault-tolerant data systems that are reusable, repeatable, and robust, and maintain them across projects.

• Contribute to standards and processes that ensure data quality, integrity, and security appropriate to risk, particularly for sensitive government data.

Mentorship of junior research teams

• Provide technical direction to several junior research teams, including research staff, engineers, and students.

• Facilitate workshops and demonstrations on research methods, and educate and train lab members and partner-agency users on NLP methodology and effective tools and techniques.
• Review code, analyses, and manuscripts, and set research and engineering standards for the lab.

• Support the professional development of team members, including their growth as independent researchers.

Research publications and dissemination

• Author to or co-author academic research papers for conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals, a key deliverable of the role; prepare and write reports and presentations.

• Direct research design, analysis, and writing across the junior teams, and help junior researchers publish their work.
• Present findings at academic conferences, partner convenings, and other venues.

• Identify research and development funding opportunities, and contribute to new partnerships and funding proposals.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (MS or Ph.D. preferred) in data science, computer science, statistics, engineering, mathematics, linguistics, economics, or a related field, and five years of relevant experience, or a combination of education and relevant experience.

• Expert knowledge of the principles related to data science and machine learning.
• Expert knowledge of Python and/or R and SQL, and the ability to research, evaluate, architect, and deploy new tools and frameworks.
• Deep understanding of modern NLP and machine learning methods, including transformer-based and large language models, when to apply them, and how to evaluate their performance.
• Demonstrated project leadership experience, including leading several projects at once and communicating technical work clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience leading and/or managing technical professionals, including mentoring junior researchers, engineers, or students.
• Record of peer-reviewed publications or equivalent research output in NLP, machine learning, or computational social science, including venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, or ICML, or leading journals.
• Experience working with government agencies or other public-sector partners.
• Experience with legal, regulatory, or other domain-specific text.
• Experience designing scalable data pipelines and platforms, and documenting use cases, solutions, and recommendations.

• Experience identifying research funding opportunities and contributing to proposals.

Core Duties:

• Provide leadership and scientific expertise in the planning and implementation of major projects, services, facilities, and activities.

• Develop advanced technological ideas, and guide their development into a final product or new approaches to research. Carry out complex or unique assignments important to the advancement of the field.

• Provide expert consultation and collaboration regarding technical requirements, capabilities, and advancement opportunities; make substantive contributions in diverse technical areas.

• Provide technical direction to other research staff, engineering associates, technicians, and/or students; facilitate workshops and demonstrations on research methods; educate and train users on research methodology and effective tools and techniques.

• Contribute to or co-author published articles, presentations, or scientific papers; identify research and development funding opportunities.

• Supervise staff and resources to meet program objectives.

Minimum Education and Experience

Bachelor’s degree and five years of relevant experience, or combination of education and relevant experience.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Expert knowledge of the principles of engineering and related natural sciences.

• Demonstrated project leadership experience.

• Demonstrated experience leading and/or managing technical professionals.