Epidemiologist, Research Associate at Clinton Health Access Initiative

Program (Division): Infectious Disease - Global Malaria

Overview of Role

• CHAI is seeking a highly motivated individual with strong public health experience and analytical skills to support the expanded surveillance and analytics scope of work across West, Central and East Africa, with an initial focus on Nigeria and Uganda.
• The candidate will provide technical support to monitor progress towards program objectives and assess the potential impact of interventions in target countries.
• The successful candidate will work directly with CHAI staff and government programs to analyze and monitor disease-related data to inform optimal approaches to best target interventions; assess, design/improve, and scale-up disease surveillance systems; monitor and evaluate the success of ongoing efforts to reduce malaria morbidity and mortality; translate results for decision-makers; and develop and manage strong relationships with regional teams, and relevant country partners.
• The candidate must be able to work independently to design, monitor and support the implementation of interventions with emphasis on malaria surveillance, control and prevention.
• The individual will work with team members across CHAI's Global, Regional and Country Malaria Teams and will therefore need to possess strong communication and organizational skills.
• It is expected that the individual will need to collaborate with government programs, academics and public health agencies to ensure CHAI's work is complementary and not duplicative.
• The position requires an individual with outstanding analytical and problem-solving skills, who is willing to work as part of a team to drive implementation; and have deep personal commitment to producing results.
• CHAI places great value on relevant personal qualities including resourcefulness, tenacity, independence, patience, humility, and strong work ethic.

Responsibilities

Analytical and Surveillance Support:

• Design and implement operational research projects: identifying knowledge gaps, defining research questions, protocol development, survey and sampling design, IRB submission, formulating training material, training and monitoring survey data collectors, data management, analysis, and dissemination;
• Organize and merge available data, assessing its quality and suitability for analysis, data management, conduct statistical analyses (generally descriptive), and present data in the form of charts and maps;
• Synthesize results through high-quality presentations, reports, and publications and translate them to national and sub-national partners to support evidence-based decision making, as well as internally and externally at international venues;
• In collaboration with country teams, provide analytical support to the National Malaria Program and its Information Management and Surveillance Units to help strengthen the new malaria surveillance platform, including improving data collection, data management, analysis, and data visualization;
• Provide technical capacity building and ongoing support to staff members involved in monitoring and evaluation activities or study implementation;
• Any other tasks identified.

Programmatic and Operational Support:

• Drive and support implementation of projects related to malaria epidemiology, intervention and surveillance, as required; driving activities and following up with key stakeholders as appropriate;
• Proactively anticipate technical challenges to project implementation, assess alternatives and propose solutions for surveillance related challenges;
• Support the development of national and sub-national level training materials with a focus on analytical content (e.g. data management best practices, data quality processes, online data collection tools), and surveillance strengthening;
• Leverage analytical expertise to improve regional work products;
• Develop and conduct monitoring and evaluation for ongoing projects, including support for the monitoring and evaluation of existing and new surveillance platforms in collaboration with the health informatics malaria team at CHAI;
• Provide ad-hoc programmatic support to country teams in service of government partners; this includes but is not limited to: program material review (e.g., training, data collection tools), report generation and program data analysis;
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with key country stakeholders across government, non-governmental organizations, and local academic institutions, with support from program managers.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Public Health, Epidemiology or related field
• Practical experience in the provision of technical or project management support for public health interventions to government programs in developing countries specifically in surveillance, monitoring and evaluation, and strengthening information systems
• Proven experience conducting and managing surveys
• Proven experience in the epidemiological analysis of health data; including but not limited to statistical and geospatial analysis programming experience (R, SAS, STATA, ArcGIS and/or other relevant software)
• High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications
• Experience working and communicating with government officials and other external partners
• Ability to work independently in remote and unstructured settings and to adapt to new environments and challenges
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills and
• Enthusiasm for applying research methods to solve global health problems;
• Willingness to travel (40-50% of time).

Advantages:

• Experience working in fast-paced, output-oriented environments
• Knowledge of malaria and/or other major global infectious disease problems
• Experience living or working in resource-limited settings
• Experience working with a decentralized team
• Experience working with surveillance platforms (e.g. DHIS2), data collection tools (e.g. ODK) and/or data visualization applications (e.g. Tableau)
• 1+ years of working experience in public health programs.