Epicentre is an organisation created by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in 1986. We conduct field epidemiology, training, and research activities for MSF interventions. Our activities for populations in precarious situations are led from Uganda, Niger, and France, and through the programs of MSF and others. They mainly concern infectious diseases and undernutrition.

Background

Epicentre is increasingly using the R programming language to manage all aspects of its data processes; including acquisition, cleaning, modelling, visualisation and reporting. This position aims to increase our internal R capacity to meet the technical demands of a large-scale Ebola vaccination trial taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working in the Analytics and Visualisation team, integrated in the Research Department, the successful applicant’s main tasks will be:

Main Activities

-          With the guidance of senior staff, assist in the development of the data management and reporting plan;

-          Program ETL (extract, transform, load) R scripts and packages to automate the following tasks:

o   Extract case report form (CRF) data from source

o   Enforce quality and consistency standards

o   Reconcile and merge data from disparate sources

o   Transform data into tidy relational formats fit for analysis and visualisation

-          Assist in the development of automated data reports using Rmarkdown;

-          Assist in the development of interactive monitoring dashboards using R Shiny;

-          Document the technical details of your work clearly to facilitate collaboration with other team members and ensure quality control;

-          Act as a technical expert to the data entry teams in the field and be able to fulfill ad-hoc data requests from project stake-holders;

-          Take analyses that have been previously completed in less flexible software packages (e.g., Excel) and implement them in R.

Candidate requirement

-  Bachelor’s or master’s degree with a strong applied quantitative component;

- 1-5 years of related work experience. Work or internship experience in public health data science strongly preferred;

- Strong proficiency in R programming with the Tidyverse suite of packages (required), developing and testing R packages (required), developing web-applications with R Shiny (preferred) and experience with SQL databases (preferred);

- Experience collaborating on technical projects using distributed version control with git

- Experience working with and managing large data sets, including merging of disparate data sets, data cleaning and transformations, and providing preliminary descriptive statistics;

- Appreciation for the fundamentals of effective data visualisation;

- Strong written and verbal communication skills;

- GitHub portfolio or other accessible code samples desired;

- Flexible working hours.

Conditions

-        Position based in Epicentre, Paris

-        Short-term Contract: 18 months

-        Starting date: as soon as possible

-        Remuneration:  According to MSF/Epicentre salary scale on 13 months; 22 extra days off, health insurance, reimbursement 50 % of public transport title, meal voucher.