Business Development Manager - Computational Social Science Lab - Penn Engineering

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University Overview The University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer in Philadelphia, is a world-renowned leader in education, research, and innovation. This historic, Ivy League school consistently ranks among the top 10 universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report survey. Penn has 12 highly-regarded schools that provide opportunities for undergraduate, graduate and continuing education, all influenced by Penn's distinctive interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and learning. As an employer Penn has been ranked nationally on many occasions with the most recent award from Forbes who named Penn one of America's Best Large Employers in 2023. Penn offers a unique working environment within the city of Philadelphia. The University is situated on a beautiful urban campus, with easy access to a range of educational, cultural, and recreational activities. With its historical significance and landmarks, lively cultural offerings, and wide variety of atmospheres, Philadelphia is the perfect place to call home for work and play. The University offers a competitive benefits package that includes excellent healthcare and tuition benefits for employees and their families, generous retirement benefits, a wide variety of professional development opportunities, supportive work and family benefits, a wealth of health and wellness programs and resources, and much more. Posted Job Title Business Development Manager - Computational Social Science Lab - Penn Engineering Job Profile Title Manager Research Project B Job Description Summary The Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) at the University of Pennsylvania is a pioneering interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to applying computational methods and large-scale data to some of the most pressing challenges facing society. Founded and led by Duncan Watts, Stevens University Professor and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the CSSLab is producing research and building tools with the potential to reshape how the public, policymakers, and institutions understand and engage with information, each other, and their communities. The Business Development Manager will play a central role in bringing the CSSLab's groundbreaking research into the world, translating academic innovation into real-world impact through strategic commercialization and partnership development. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge computational social science, artificial intelligence, and public benefit, helping to ensure that transformative tools reach the organizations, institutions, and communities that need them most. The CSSLab's commercialization portfolio includes projects that directly address urgent societal needs: The Media Bias Detector uses AI, machine learning, human-in-the-loop raters to track and classify the top news articles from major news publishers in almost real time, examining tone, partisan lean, topic selection, and fact usage at an unprecedented level of granularity. The tool offers a near real-time, high-stakes environment to observe and analyze how media outlets present and potentially skew the same news event, revealing editorial choices and publisher patterns, and providing a foundation for informed democratic participation. The Deliberation Lab is an open-science platform that enables researchers to conduct large-scale experiments in small-group deliberation, the kind of structured conversation through which people learn from one another, build mutual respect, and solve collective problems. Kickstarted by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, this platform can run more experimental trials in a single afternoon than traditional conversation studies achieve in a year, systematically mapping what makes deliberation succeed or fail across different populations, topics, and demographic compositions. In a world of growing polarization and eroding civic discourse, the Deliberation Lab offers a science-backed path toward more productive dialogue and stronger democratic engagement. NOMAD (Network for Open Mobility Analysis and Data) is an infrastructure project designed to democratize access to large-scale GPS mobility data and standardize the analytical tools necessary for human mobility science and epidemiology. By dismantling the barriers that currently limit researchers' and policymakers' ability to access and then use mobility data effectively, NOMAD advances equity, enabling research by smaller and diverse institutions globally, and supporting applications in historically data-poor regions. From pandemic response planning to urban design and public health, NOMAD has the potential to transform how societies understand the movement of people and use that intelligence to answer impactful research questions. For Penn and its alumni network, the commercialization of these projects represents an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate that world-class academic research can drive meaningful change beyond the univer

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