Data Use Specialist At Resolve to Save Lives

Data Use Specialist

The National Public Health Institute of Liberia (NPHIL) is a governmental center of excellence created in 2016 to address the challenges experienced in responding to Ebola from 2013 to 2016. NPHIL’s mission is to strengthen existing infection prevention and control efforts, laboratories, surveillance, infectious disease control, public health capacity building, response to outbreaks, and monitoring diseases with epidemic potential.

NPHIL achieves this mission by: ● Contributing to the development and sustainability of the public health workforce ● Developing, enhancing, and expanding the surveillance and response platform ● Developing and strengthening the laboratory system and public health diagnostics ● Developing, enhancing, and expanding processes and structures to protect environmental and occupational health ● Expanding, conducting, and coordinating public health and medical research to inform Liberian public health policies ● Ensuring sustainable financing and operations of the NPHIL

The Role: In partnership with Resolve to Save Lives, NPHIL now seeks qualified candidates for the position of Data Use Specialist. This role is responsible for developing and supporting data processing and analysis for effective public health surveillance. The position will be expected to work with diverse types of data from different public health systems to include healthcare settings, laboratory, survey data, and other relevant sources to create clear and compelling data analyses, visualizations, and reports for enhancing outbreak preparedness and response.

The Data Use Specialist will report to the director of NPHIL’s Division of Infectious Disease Epidemiology (DIDE). The role is a 24-month contract opportunity, with the possibility to renew at the end of the term. We are prioritizing applications from Liberian nationals for this role.

Duties and responsibilities: ● Work with users to document and clarify the goals and requirements for data analysis and visualization projects. ● Evaluate requirements with users of existing systems and make recommendations to improve preparedness and response capacity. ● Develop reusable and automated processes to easily access, clean, and analyze public health data sources.

● Develop simple and compelling data visualizations that communicate effectively patterns, trends, and insights observed from public health data. ● Create documentation for databases and associated data analyses to support sustainability and reuse of core data products. ● Make recommendations for improvements to data collection and processing solutions to improve quality, accuracy, and utility. ● Support capacity-building activities for the NPHIL team to increasingly absorb data use and analytics capacity. ● Perform ad hoc data analysis for novel challenges or project-specific needs. ● Support capacity building on data use and analysis within NPHIL’s team of public health experts. ● Support decision-making and governance processes by providing data analysis and utilization expertise.

Experience, skills, and abilities: ● 5+ years of experience with: -> Statistical programs such as R, Python, SAS, SPSS, Stata, etc. -> Relational databases (SQL, MS Access), data over APIs, and other file formats. -> Designing and building data visualizations with tools such as Microsoft Office, DHIS2, R, Datawrapper, Infogram, ChartBlocks, PowerBI, Tableau, etc. ● Experience with public health or health care data ● Experience supporting user research ● Ability to work both as part of a team and independently ● Bachelors degree in statistics, biostatistics, or other related technical fields.