Institute Overview
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is a leading research organization in Africa with a strong track record in developing, testing and validating innovations for health. Driven by a core strategic mandate for research, training and services, the Institute’s work now spans a wide spectrum, covering biomedical and ecological sciences, intervention studies, health-systems research and policy translation.
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Position Summary
The Ifakara Health Institute is seeking a Senior Research Scientist with advanced modelling skills who will join the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) East Africa (EA) Node team. The SRS will contribute to the project’s mission and objectives of developing and employing cutting-edge advanced geospatial analytical architectures to understand the risks and estimate the burden of Plasmodiumfalciparum and Plasmodiumvivaxmalaria, assessing the impact of interventions across various levels and settings at global, regional and national to provide the National Malaria Control Programmes (NMCPs) with the quality evidence to guide optimal allocation of resources in malaria-endemic countries.
MAP seeks out candidates with a growth mindset that love to learn, adapt, create, and develop into independent geospatial modellers/researchers – with mentorship and guidance available from senior MAP members and external collaborators. The post-docs should demonstrate and follow best coding and data-management practices, be creative by adapting/developing methodologies that can be utilized by others within the team and/or used in a complex analytical pipeline. Post-docs should also lead the preparation of scientific reports and journal articles for publication of research findings from their work in open access journals but also contribute to the team communication strategies. This role also involves collaboration with a wide range of malaria stakeholders, translating model outputs to NMCPs and communicating the utility to the malaria decision, building and strengthening analytical skills to others through training, mentoring and supervision.
Duties and Responsibilities Geospatial modelling and coding standards
- Provide statistical expertise in development and implementation of spatiotemporal models to respond to a variety of malaria research questions related to risk estimations, estimating of morbidity and mortality, understanding transmission profiles, and optimizing the impact of interventions.
- Contribute and guide others on communication, disseminating, and interpretation of outputs from analysis and relevant conclusions to key stakeholders.
- Manage own academic research and administrative activities, including small-scale project management to coordinate multiple aspects of the work to meet deadlines.
- Work with the data scientist and data engineering team on creating data-pipelines, setting up computation infrastructure and managing NMCP’s data and outputs requests.
- Work collaboratively with other scientists within the wider MAP group to produce estimates of malaria, acting as a source of information and advice to other members of the group.
- Apply due diligence by scrutinizing model results for all project deliverables, reviewing and refining theories as appropriate.
- Maintain rigorous data- and code management practices, including thorough documentation and version control, to ensure data replicability and cross-compatibility with past and future MAP products.
Publications and engagement
- Contribute ideas for new research projects and for generating research income.
- Contribute to and, as appropriate, lead, in the preparation of scientific reports and journal articles for publication of research findings from this work in open access journals.
- Lead collaboration and engagements with NMCPs to translate and communicate MAP’s modelling efforts, products, and outputs to foster utilization and uptake.
- Present the research findings at selected regional and international conferences and meetings.
- Travel to collaborators in different MECs, Europe, the United States, Africa, and Asia.
Workplace safety
- Take reasonable care for your own safety and health and avoid harming the safety and health of others through any act or omission at work.
- Identify and assess workplace hazards and apply hazard controls.
- Report every workplace injury, illness or near miss, no matter how insignificant they seem.
- Abide by institutional policies and procedures.
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Qualification and Experience Essential skills and competences
- PhD in statistics, biostatistics, mathematics, or a similar quantitative discipline with epidemiological and/or ecological background.
- Expertise in Bayesian approaches (e.g. Gaussian processes) and spatio-temporal modelling with demonstrable understanding of the issues arising from scaling these models to a global scale, validation, assessing performance and sensitivity analysis.
- Experience of multi-metric analysis
- Experience in covariate selection in the context of modelling large and complex data with spatial correlations.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., R/Python, Stata, C++), knowledge of other statistical software and data visualization applications.
- Experience of state-of-the-art statistical software libraries such as INLA, TMB, Py-Torch or similar packages.
- Demonstrable commitment to using best practices in writing code, including the use of source control, code documentation/repositories, and coding standards.
- Experience of working with national disease programmes, managing relationships with senior stakeholders, data-owners, and collaborators.
- Experience in research design, implementation, analyzing malaria surveillance data in LMICs hence understanding of challenges on data utilization and quality in low resource settings.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English, both professional and courteous manner.
- Ability to manage own academic research, mentoring junior staff, define and meet milestones.
- Demonstrable evidence of having worked successfully within a collaborative, team-based research setting.
Desirable
- An understanding of the malaria epidemiology and public health surveillance.
- Track record of scientific publications in high quality peer-reviewed journals in the areas of epidemiology, modelling or health system research.
- Experience of working with NMCPs, malaria surveillance including using DHIS2.
- Knowledge and experience in working with ministries of health in LMICs, funding agencies and bilateral organizations.
- Experience in developing and delivering training for different audiences; Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
- Ability to frequently travel locally, regionally and internationally.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the workplace and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
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Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Wednesday, November 15th 2023. All email application subject lines should include: SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST – Geospatial Modelling – Map EA Node DAR. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for an interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
#5 Ifakara Street Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
| Job Summary | ||
| Position: | Senior Research Scientist – Geospatial Modelling (2 Posts) | |
| Reports To: | Team Lead/Technical Lead – MAP EA | |
| Work Station: | Dar es Salaam | |
| Apply By: | 15th November 2023 |
Institute Overview
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is a leading research organization in Africa with a strong track record in developing, testing and validating innovations for health. Driven by a core strategic mandate for research, training and services, the Institute’s work now spans a wide spectrum, covering biomedical and ecological sciences, intervention studies, health-systems research and policy translation.
Position Summary
Ifakara Health Institute is seeking a Data Analyst to join the East Africa (EA) Node of the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) team. The Data Analyst will support the team in designing, building and running the software and systems from frontend to backend, that underpin the project’s large-scale solutions to support advances in the study of malaria and associated topics. The role requires both, the business thinking approach and technical expertise around several steps on the development of the analytical tools and architectures for the processing of large amounts of (spatial, non-spatial) data i.e., design, build, deploy, and maintain. The Analyst is expected to collaborate with a team of postdocs/modellers to build high quality software and systems that provides a mature user experience, ensuring smooth delivery and update of production service with no user impact and create world class, robust APIs to enable internal and external users to access the project’s data.
Duties and Responsibilities Business analysis
- Proactively work with researchers across the team through all stages of design and testing to ensure that developments meet user requirements.
- Communicate directly with external stakeholders to present options for technical solutions using prototypes, walkthroughs and software demonstrations where appropriate. Technical development
- Design, build, test and document developments, working from functional specifications or detailed change requests.
- Provide support and maintenance for production systems.
- Proactively support production of scientific models that are scalable, robust and high-performing.
- Maintain an understanding of data models and technical designs of applications being developed.
- Make performance improvements to models so that we can reach improved levels of scale.
- Identifying and implementing generalizations and abstractions of existing and new data models.
Data lifecycle
- Develop and maintain pipelines to extract, synthesize and integrate data from various sources, making it available to computational scientific models and user interfaces
- Develop and maintain tools to facilitate the extraction of needed metrics for malaria modelling from academic papers and other reports
- Lead the development of web interactive dashboards to examine, manipulate, process data and, to disseminate the results of MAP modelling efforts
- Support the process of selection, and implementation of data extraction and manipulation protocols.
- Maintain an understanding of data models and technical designs of applications being developed
Workplace safety
- Take reasonable care for your own safety and health and avoid harming the safety and health of others through any act or omission at work.
- Identify and assess workplace hazards and apply hazard controls.
- Report every workplace injury, illness or near miss, no matter how insignificant they seem.
- Abide by institutional policies and procedures.
Qualification and Experience Essential skills and competences
- Master’s degree in computer science, software development or related subject area with at least 1 year of experience in data science. Desirable: PhD degree level in computer/data science, software development or related subject area.
- Experience programming in Java and/or Python/R.
- Solid expertise and working knowledge with large datasets and relational databases (SQL) Knowledge of web front-end technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- Excellent written and oral communication skills (in English language) including ability to present complex information in a concise and clear manner to people from different backgrounds.
- Solid understanding of relational and non-relational database design principles.
- Strong understanding of web services or clients consuming web services.
- Ability to pick up new software, frameworks and APIs quickly.
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Desirable
- Understanding of malaria epidemiology and public health surveillance in malaria endemic countries.
- Experience working collaboratively on code/scripts with version control using e.g. Git.
- Experience developing interactive dashboards and handling big data.
- Knowledge and experience developing R packages and workflow pipelines.
- An understanding of distributed data processing methodologies and frameworks. Experience with clustering and containerization technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker etc).
- Experience with at least one public cloud environment (e.g., Google Cloud Platform, AWS, etc.) Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the workplace and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Wednesday, November 15th 2023. All email application subject lines should include: RESEARCH SCIENTIST- Data Analyst – Map EA Node DAR. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for an interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
#5 Ifakara Street Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
| Job Summary | |
| Position: | Research Scientist-Data Analyst/Programmer (1 Post) |
| Reports To: | Team Lead/Technical Lead – MAP EA |
| Work Station: | Dar es Salaam |
| Apply By: | 15th November 2023 |
Institute Overview
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is a leading research organization in Africa with a strong track record in developing, testing and validating innovations for health. Driven by a core strategic mandate for research, training and services, the Institute’s work now spans a wide spectrum, covering biomedical and ecological sciences, intervention studies, health-systems research and policy translation.
Position Summary
The Ifakara Health Institute is seeking a Research Scientist who will work with the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) East Africa (EA) Node team and play a significant and strategic role in continuously assisting core researchers while improving the data science capability and contributing to the development of analytical models, preparing input data, deploying workflows, and disseminating results, including writing reports, papers for peer-reviewed publication, posters, etc., and engaging with relevant collaborators. Each RS will be allowed to design and implement his/her project with specific deliverables contributing to MAP’s overall objective and scope.
Duties and Responsibilities Data gathering and processing
- Provide direct support to geospatial modellers including conducting high quality epidemiological analyses to support strategic analytics for global, regional, national and sub-national projects.
- Perform extensive literature reviews, data mining/extraction and other information from published literature, official reports and other sources as needed.
- Obtain, manage, and conduct preliminary processing and analysis on a variety of datasets, such as geo processing data for surveys, health facilities and data cleaning for surveillance type data (e.g. DHIS2, DHS/MIS/MICS).
- Utilize software including Excel, ArcGIS/QGIS, SAS, STATA, and R, Python and others to examine, manipulate, analyse and process data, create high-quality data visualizations for reports, publications and dissemination activities.
- Select, follow, and adapt data extraction and manipulation protocols.
- Promote the best practice on use of data and conduct analytics by being responsible with others for general IT housekeeping, maintenance of back-ups, documentation of protocols, data processing procedures, and review of procedures. Dissemination and publications
- Understand and abide by the protocols of engaging with project stakeholders for effective collaboration. Contribute to creation of text, maps, figures and other materials as requested for scientific reports, posters, peer-reviewed publications, to be credited via co- authorships.
- Contribute to discussions and translating research findings with colleagues and collaborators including sharing and presenting results to partner institutions and various audiences with different technical understanding.
- Provide mentorship, supervision and training to key partners (e.g. NMCPs), interns, students and internal staff when needed on data science and spatial analytics for public health.
- Maintain the confidentiality of unpublished research data. Workplace safety
- Take reasonable care for your own safety and health and avoid harming the safety and health of others through any act or omission at work.
- Identify and assess workplace hazards and apply hazard controls.
- Report every workplace injury, illness or near miss, no matter how insignificant they seem.
- Abide by institutional policies and procedures.
Qualification and Experience Essential skills and competences
- Completion of a master’s degree in a relevant subject area i.e., statistics, mathematics, data/computer science/engineering, or a similar quantitative discipline, public health, epidemiology and ecology related fields with strong quantitative capacity will be considered.
- Strong computer, organizational, analytical, and problem-solving skills
- Experience in managing, analysing, interpreting, wrangling and manipulating data using software platforms; Skills on use of R software is essential.
- Ability to communicate (verbal and written) in the English language. Proven project and time management abilities.
Read Also:
Desirable
- An understanding of the epidemiology of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and other infectious diseases, public health.
- Experience of working with spatial data and geometry files using GIS tools is an asset.
- Ability and experience to write codes in R-studio/Pro, develop packages and dashboards, machine learning.
- Interest for career development including joining MSc or PhD program in modelling.
- Experience in teaching, development and delivering training for different audiences.
- Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the workplace and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Wednesday, November 15th 2023. All email application subject lines should include: RESEARCH SCIENTIST – Map EA Node DAR. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for an interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
#5 Ifakara Street Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
| Job Summary | |
| Position: | Research Scientist (2 Posts) |
| Reports To: | Team Lead/Technical Lead – MAP EA |
| Work Station: | Dar es Salaam |
| Apply By: | 15th November 2023 |
