Lecturer (NUS College)

Job Description

NUS College (NUSC), the honours program for the National University of Singapore, plans to hire dedicated individuals to fill numerous vacancies. These are full-time, renewable lecturer positions that include opportunities for pedagogical research funding and for promotion to Associate Professor with Open Contract on the NUS Educator Track, as described below.

Duties and Responsibilities

The primary responsibility is to offer at least one of our mandatory courses, to which you will be expected to bring your own academic and intellectual expertise. The courses are:

Reasoning with Data (GEA1000N)

The core competency course Reasoning with Data (RWD) concerns how data are collected, organised, analysed, presented, and discussed to gain understanding and guide actions. Students build numerical intuition and skills in data visualisation, descriptive and inferential statistics, probability, and hypothesis testing. Each topic is explored with real-world data and contexts ranging from voting patterns to environmental quality. To facilitate problem-solving and practical application, the course uses both a flipped classroom approach and team-based learning with peers from diverse technical and quantitative backgrounds. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on critical approaches and conceptual understanding alongside technical mastery.

Impact Experience Project (NEP3001)

The Impact Experience (IEx) is an eight-unit capstone course that all NUS College students will have to undertake for two years. Students will work in interdisciplinary teams to collaborate with non-profit partners and innovate future solutions for the benefit of communities and society in Southeast Asia, including Singapore. Each team of 6-7 students is supervised by a lecturer who specializes in the area they are working with. Students would choose to work with lecturers clustered into three broad areas: Science and Technology, Arts and Design, Civic and Community.

Global Experience courses (NEX3000 series)

Our flagship Global Experience (GEx) courses offer specially curated programmes in specially selected cities around the world. Students will choose from a variety of themes offered, unique to each city or region. The structure of each GEx is uniquely designed and goes well beyond traditional classwork and will involve activities such as: seminars with guest professors; workshops with practitioners; masterclasses with experts; fireside chats with important personalities; and field visits to pertinent sites such as start-ups, research centres, government offices, cultural and community institutions. Students will be required to participate fully in these curated activities for the entirety of the programme duration. Each GEx has a theme that leverages the relative strengths of the region and takes place for one month in the summer, with a few preparatory lectures and seminars in the semester before, and assignments due in the semester after.

Applicants from any field representing the sciences and quantitative social sciences are welcome to apply for this position. We are interested in candidates whose work is cross-disciplinary and can be applied to better understand and tackle social, environmental and developmental problems in Singaporean and Southeast Asian contexts. This includes having clear ideas about how the use of modern artificial intelligence systems can be incorporated (where appropriate) to help better understand or address those problems.

The selected candidate's primary responsibility will be to teach RWD together with other course instructors to ensure that students have a common curricular experience while allowing for individual instructor creativity in their seminars. Applicants should demonstrate their ability to teach such a course. The other responsibility will be to supervise IEx student teams working on projects that involve community service learning in Southeast Asia, and/or to teach the GEx course in Southeast Asia. Therefore, applicants with community networks in field sites in Southeast Asia are preferred. Successful candidates are expected to offer 2-3 sections of RWD in the academic year, an elective of their own design, supervise 3-6 IEx teams in a Southeast Asian country (excluding Singapore) and/or teach the GEx in a Southeast Asian country (excluding Singapore) on a rotational basis, and take on a small supervision load of independent study modules.

Qualifications

Candidates must hold a PhD. Remuneration and benefits are highly competitive on the global research university level. Expatriate benefits may include travel assistance from overseas and limited housing benefits.

Appointments begin at the level of Lecturer on the Educator Track. Although the NUS Educator Track is not a tenurable line, it offers a pathway to promotion to Associate Professorship on an open contract (and beyond), as well as opportunities for pedagogical research funding, including overseas research and conference travel. The contract is for three years in the first instance and is renewable subject to good performance.

Interested applicants should prepare and submit the following documents when they apply:

• A cover letter, clearly specifying which position they are applying for.
• CV: An abridged CV (5-page maximum), including details on education, employment history, past experience of teaching and supervision, research activities (including publications) and achievements, honours and awards, and service accomplishments.
• Qualifications: Include scanned copies of academic degrees.
• Teaching Portfolio:
  • A Teaching Statement that commences with a preface (maximum 300 words) that makes the case for appointment. This should be a highly distilled summary of key contributions to student learning and, if applicable, educational leadership, guided by your teaching philosophy. The rest of the Statement, of not more than 2,000 words, should outline your teaching philosophy and your educational contribution across multiple dimensions and roles. Please include evidence on how you have impact students' learning experience and outcomes as well as how you have influenced peers and the community.
  • Teaching evaluations and peer review reports, if available. Other evidence of teaching excellence and/or other contributions to education, e.g., curriculum development, pedagogical innovation etc., should also be provided.
• A proposal, of not more than 500 words, describing a prospective syllabus for the target course.
• A statement, of not more than 500 words, highlighting how you plan to contribute to pedagogical innovation and/or advance interdisciplinary honours education at NUSC.
• FOUR referees' letters (one of whom must be the applicant's PhD supervisor).

Interviews will normally be conducted online. Only shortlisted applicants will be notified.

More information about NUSC and our curriculum can be found on our website: https://nuscollege.nus.edu.sg/

Additional information about Academic Appointments at NUS can be found here: http://www.nus.edu.sg/careers