Careers

Description:

IHME has an excellent opportunity for a Research Scientist  to join the Environmental, Occupational, and Dietary (EOD) Risk Factors team on the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study.

POSITION PURPOSE
The GBD is a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time, and is the largest and most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. This position will be responsible for modeling air pollution, such as PM2.5 and NO2, and its impact on health burden. It will also support the EOD team’s emerging climate and health portfolio.

IHME researchers analyze and produce key estimates for their assigned research team and will assess all available quantitative data – from surveys, vital registration, censuses, literature, registries, and administrative records. Using established modeling tools and through creation of novel code, researchers incorporate all relevant data to produce the most up-to-date and scientifically credible results. Researchers working on risk factors provide comprehensive assessments of the magnitude of exposure, relative risk, and attributable burden of disease.

You will be integrally involved in producing, critiquing, improving, and disseminating results. You are someone who is capable of keeping your team on track to meet deadlines and research objectives. You already have a publication record, and at IHME, you will build out your portfolio with several peer-reviewed papers. You thrive in a collaborative work environment and are capable of working on multiple projects concurrently while meeting deadlines. You keep current of recent scientific, engineering, and technical advances and are able to translate these into your research.

You are expected to interact successfully with a wide range of partners and to describe complex concepts and materials concisely. Overall, researchers are critical members of agile, dynamic research teams. This position is contingent on project funding availability.

Skills/Eligibility:

Master’s degree in public health, epidemiology, statistics, biostatistics, math, economics, quantitative social sciences, or related discipline plus four years’ related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.

• Proven interest in environmental risk factors and the related data sources and scientific underpinnings.
   
• Strong analytic, critical thinking, and quantitative skills.
   
• Working ability with R programming language.
   
• Growing peer network where sought out as having solid command of engineering/technical areas, a given disease, risk, key indicator, relevant methodological area, and the related data sources and scientific underpinnings.
   
• Excellent analytic, critical thinking, and quantitative skills.
   
• Results- and detail-oriented individual who can initiate and complete tasks under tight deadlines and changing priorities both independently and in a team environment. Flexibility with hours and workload is key.
   
• Experience devising and executing statistical modeling techniques.
   
• Demonstrated ability to quickly recognize problems in results and identify root causes in data, methods, and code.
   
• Ease in designing, executing, and troubleshooting code in R. Python a plus.
   
• Excellent written and oral communication skills required, including track record of success in coauthorship on multiple scientific papers, presenting results, and representing research at meetings.
   
• Demonstrated ability to contribute to and sustain collaborations with external research teams.
   
• Experience in working with large data sets, including devising strategies for reliable data management for large data sets, computationally efficient modeling techniques to use such data sets, and critical evaluation of highly multidimensional model outputs that result from such work.
   
• Ability to work both independently and in collaboration with a team.
   
• A long-term interest in a research scientist position contributing to the overall mission of our research.
   
• A commitment to working alongside others at IHME to illuminate the health impacts of systemic racism and to work within IHME to make our organization more diverse and inclusive. See IHME’s DEI statement here: https://www.healthdata.org/about/dei.