The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) is leading Africa-based, African-led, international research institution headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, and conducting policy-relevant research on population, health, education, urbanization and related development issues on the continent. APHRC is also committed to developing the next generation of globally competitive African scholars and leads by example through numerous research capacity strengthening initiatives and strong partnerships with top African universities and research institutions.
Job Summary
The APHRC seeks to recruit a Data Scientist within the Research Capacity Strengthening (RCS) Division, to work on a large scale initiative whose goals are to transform the Research and Development (R&D) ecosystem in Africa through:
- Designing and running a matching service between universities/research institutes based in all the regions of Africa and funding agencies for R&D.
- Configuring and running Africa–wide platform–based capacity–building for universities/research institutes based in all of Africa’s regions, to increase their capabilities to do more and perform better on a sustained basis along the spectrum of implementation research.
- Designing and developing prototypes in selected countries, to link country decision–making systems with national research systems for adoption/scale–up of R&D innovations.
- Strengthening the African innovation–research ecosystem by developing and deploying connectors – platforms that have cross–cutting benefits to researchers and decision makers.
The overall responsibility of the Data Scientist is to maintain and update an existing database with institutional level information and to lead the development of a prototype for a research data repository. S/he will also contribute to the day–to–day running of the whole initiative.
Responsibilities:
- Conduct tracking and sourcing of sector specific R&D data from across Africa for updating a regional data repository;
- Develop an interactive data platform complete with a data archiving protocol/architecture, programming the protocols, data cleaning etc.;
- Create automated systems for data harmonization and consistency checks;
- Data cleaning and harmonization including conducting all the required consistency checks for data from various partners and studies;
- Contribute to the development of scientific data standards;
- Documentation of data sets from various partners according to agreed guidelines on data documentation, archiving and sharing;
- Perform basic and advanced statistical analyses;
- Facilitate discussions on data extraction, access and sharing protocols with project partners;
- Participate in learning forums with stakeholders to inform regional and global discourses on R&D capacity in Africa;
- Support efforts to enhance project visibility;
- Write technical reports on data issues; and
- Participate in grant writing.
Qualifications and Experience:
- Bachelors or Master’s degree in computer science, statistics, economics, machine learning, or other related technical disciplines.
- At least five years (for Bachelor degree holders) or three years (for Master’s degree holders) post qualification experience in managing, mining, processing, cleaning and quality assessment of data from diverse studies.
- Experience in data management using relational databases such as MySQL or other is essential.
- Experience in data documentation using software such as NESTAR or other is essential.
- Experience in data analysis using STATA, R, SPSS or other statistical software.
- Knowledge of a programming language such as Python, Perl, R, JAVA, or equivalent.
- Experience working with longitudinal studies and handling large data sets is desirable.
- Experience in visualizing/presenting data for stakeholders and the use of relevant data science tools kit.
- Ability to regularly report and synthesize emerging information.
- Good written communication and presentation skills.
- Bilingual language skills (French and English) will be an added advantage.
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