Postdoctoral Fellowship opportunity

[Sherilee Diebold-Cooze]

School of Environment, Enterprise and Development: Faculty of Environment 

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP in SOCIAL INNOVATION

•	•	One year, fulltime, postdoctoral fellowship
•	•	45 0K annual salary, office and administrative support provided
•	•	Supervision by the McConnell Chair in Social Innovation

The University of Waterloo’s initiative called Social Innovation Generation (SiG at Waterloo) is offering postdoctoral fellowships to start September 2011 for a one year time period. Social Innovation Generation (SiG) is a national initiative funded by the J.W McConnell Family Foundation and is designed to build capacity for broad system change in Canada.

Currently, two specific areas of interest and commitment are the challenges of engaging vulnerable populations (for example, those with a mentally illness, aging populations and newcomers to Canada) and building social ecological resilience. SiG at Waterloo works within a national consortium and through these partnerships identifies areas of promising innovation across Canada, and designs education and research projects to support new knowledge generation for application in a variety of domains, from policy arenas to the grass roots level. New knowledge about social innovation processes and approaches are disseminated through publications, courses and other education vehicles as well as collaborative research networks.

The postdoctoral fellow will work primarily with Dr. Frances Westley, McConnell Chair in Social Innovation, but will also have the opportunity to engage with a team of staff, faculty members and graduate students attached to the SiG at Waterloo initiative. The successful candidate may collaborate with researchers across campus in such interdisciplinary centres as the Waterloo Institute on Complexity and Innovation and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.  Qualified candidates will have a PhD (within the last five years) and a strong research background, with particular emphasis on innovation. Other related research areas might include social change, technical innovation, new forms of knowledge production, institutional entrepreneurship, resilience, transformational leadership, organizational design, organizational behaviour, collaborative management, complexity theory, and/or whole system change. The ideal candidates will be interested in joining problem solving teams writing proposals for research funding, leading teams researching social innovation, and collaborating on research articles for publication.  and be comfortable working in interdisciplinary research and teaching contexts linked to social innovation agendas.


Review of applications will begin on May 1, 2011 and will continue until the positions are filled. Send curriculum vitae, one research paper  and and arrange for two letters of reference to be sent to: Dr. Frances Westley, Social Innovation Generation, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada.  For more information, email Cheryl Rose, Director of Partnerships and Programs; carose at uwaterloo.ca