"PAC Research Assistant"

PAC Research Assistant

Req No: 2026-19961

Category: Research/Project

Type: Student

Salary: $17.75 - $22.00

Overview

The salary range for this position is $17.75 - $22.00 per hour depending upon qualifications and is non-neogtiable.

Established in 1943, the mission of the SDSU Research Foundation (SDSURF) is to support the research objectives of San Diego State University by helping faculty and staff find, obtain, and administer funding for their research and sponsored programs. SDSU achieved its strategic plan goal of becoming an R1, premier public research university in early 2025 furthering discoveries, interventions, and solutions that improve communities and change the world. SDSURF provides the full life cycle of grants services to faculty and staff to further their important work.

Our vision is to foster a culture of creativity and collaboration with integrity and respect for individuals that results in the delivery of superior service to support the university's strategic aspirations.

Our core values:

Service: We are a service organization that strives to provide superior support to the university community to achieve SDSU's goals; we are committed to being professionally competent by setting high standards and working hard to achieve results; and we continually seeking to improve our skills and capabilities by valuing education and professional development.

Collaboration: We seek to actively engage with our stakeholders and employees to identify issues and design solutions, build strong relationships grounded in trust, openness, and inclusion and achieve the best results by taking pride in the accomplishments of our colleagues.

Innovation: We work towards inspired solutions to improve and adapt to emerging opportunities and challenges, creative ways to streamline and enhance our delivery of services through resourceful and proactive problem solving and strategic use of technology and reduction of obstacles.

Respect: We promote a culture where every individual is valued and treated with dignity, we honor open-mindedness toward different viewpoints and ideas and have a genuine appreciation for varied backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking.

Integrity: We are committed to act with the highest ethical standards, with honesty, integrity, and transparency, provide consistent and accurate information and value and respect all individuals.

Prison Arts Collective (PAC) works to expand access to the transformative power of the arts through collaboration and mutual learning that supports the development of self-expression, reflection, communication, and empathy through providing multidisciplinary arts programming in correctional institutions. PAC currently facilitates weekly multidisciplinary arts programming and art facilitator training programs in 14 prisons throughout California. PAC is based at San Diego State University and has partnerships with Humboldt State University, and California State University, San Bernardino.

The Research Assistant position supports the Prison Arts Collective (PAC) research program, including support with organization and analysis of collected data, remaining in compliance with university and state IRB, supervision of research interns, and helping to communicate about PAC research within the university and academic community. The Research Assistant assists the PAC leadership team to guide and support the research portion of the project in alignment with PAC's mission and vision.

Responsibilities

Research Support & Data Management 95%

Specific Duties

• Maintain accurate records, safeguarding the confidentiality of participants, as necessary
• Organize survey data in the PAC office and the Google Drive, including digitizing documents and securely managing and effectively organizing data and other materials.
• Track completion of pre and post programming surveys for all facilities.
• Review physical copies in the PAC office to digitize, record and shred as needed.
• Conduct analyses as directed by research faculty and staff.
• Support in summarizing results and generating papers and conference presentations.
• Collaborate with research faculty and staff on research products and ideas.
• Attend research-related bimonthly meetings
• Pro-actively maintain regular email communication with research team to share progress and updates
• Ensure that the project remains in alignment with state IRB protocols.
• Collaborate with all members of the research team.

Other Duties as Assigned 5%

Qualifications

Knowledge and Abilities:

• Must live in a commutable distance from San Diego State University at the time of hire
• Flexibility, patience, positivity, problem solving skills, self-starter
• Willingness to learn
• Willingness to work as part of a team.
• Passion for the mission and work of the program

Education and Experience:

Undergraduate Student Assistant: Current enrollment as an undergraduate student at SDSU.

Graduate Student Assistant: Equivalent to completion of a bachelor's degree and registration in an SDSU graduate degree program.

Preferred Qualifications and Special Skills:

• Experience with Google Suite products such as Sheets, Drive, Gmail, and Calendar
• Experience with Microsoft products such as Excel and Word
• Statistics Software such as SPSS
• Experience scanning documents to a computer
• Research experience in similar or related field