Dr Draca wins ESRC Future Leader award

Dr Mirko Draca, an Assistant Professor in the Department, has won an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Leader award to start from January 2016 for two years.

The ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme aims to enable outstanding early-career social scientists, in partnership with their host organisation, to acquire the skills set to become the future world leaders in their field.

Dr Draca’s research interests focuses on labor economics and applied microeconomics and his project is titled "The Analysis of Automation by Means of Automation".

The project is about using automated, machine learning classification techniques to analyse historical job description text and look at the rise of automation/technology within jobs. Mirko gave an example of his work:

It is using the same statistical techniques that form the basis of technologies such as consumer recommender systems, as used on websites such as Netflix or Amazon, and self-driving vehicles but applying these tools to social science questions relating to the automation of jobs.

The Department would like to congratulate Mirko on his achievement.