Laboratory Scientist (1 Post) – Dar
The position of Laboratory Scientist reports to the Principal Investigator of the MSMT2 project and is based in Dar es Salaam.
Position Summary
The Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) in collaboration with the Ministry of Health through the National Malaria Control Programme, the President’s Office, Regional Administration, and Local Government, and the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) are jointly implementing the second phase of the project on molecular surveillance of malaria in Mainland Tanzania (MSMT2). IHI is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Laboratory Scientist to perform laboratory activities for the project.
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Duties and Responsibilities
Laboratory Scientist is expected to perform the following duties:
- Plan and supervise the collection of samples from participating health facilities and perform analysis of samples collected by the project.
- Ensure all specimens delivered to the laboratory are properly and appropriately registered, and processed and all test results are recorded according to standard operating procedures (SOPs) of the MSMT2 project.
- Ensure storage and location of records of specimens are conducted in accordance with SOPs.
- Plan and perform routine and specialized technical procedures required by the project including troubleshooting during work.
- Assist in maintaining standards and cleanliness of laboratory equipment in accordance with the engineer’s advice, guidelines and equipment manual.
- Perform the experimental processes according to the laboratory analysis plan of the project and ensure results are generated timely and are of high quality
- Participate in Quality Control programs as required by Good Clinical Laboratory Practices
- (GCLP) to ensure the reliability of testing procedures, proper functioning of laboratory equipment and compliance with relevant regulations.
- Endeavour to refine and upgrade laboratory processes in order to save experimental costs and improve performance of the laboratory.
- Review the laboratory results to improve the experimental protocol and to increase the success rate.
- Prepare and update SOPs, and engage in other administrative work as directed by senior project leaders.
- To perform molecular, genetic, genomic, and serological laboratory and data analytics to support malaria molecular surveillance (MMS) and other requirements based on the project requirement.
- Generating genomic data in of all three genomes involved in malaria (parasites, vectors and human) and any other data as may be assigned by senior project leaders.
- Assist and ensure that preventive maintenance of laboratory equipment is carried out as planned.
- Be able to work on-call duties when required to do so.
- Performing any other duties as may be assigned by the Project Principal Investigator and other senior leaders of the project and IHI.
Qualification and Experience
- Bachelors’ degree in Life Sciences (Molecular Biology, Biotechnology and Laboratory sciences, Medical Laboratory Science or other relevant fields).
- Applicants should have experience in genomics and practical skills in different molecular biology techniques; with at least three (3) years of proven working experience in a similar field. This is essential and critical for this post.
- Prior research experience in genomics, bioinformatics, or a related field, hands-on next-generation sequencing (NGS) laboratory skills such as library preparation and sequencing on Illumina MiSeq or similar NGS platforms is highly advantageous.
- Prior experience with bioinformatics tools and databases, such as BLAST, NCBI, Ensembl, or UCSC Genome Browser, etc. will be an added advantage.
Skills and Competencies
- Basic analytical skills with the ability to interpret complex genomic data and draw meaningful conclusions.
- Applicants should be excellent in written and verbal communication skills with adequate proficiency in English language communication.
- Flexible and adoptive to new environments.
- Good clinical laboratory practices.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the work place and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Thursday, 15 November 2024. All e-mail application subject lines should include: [LABORATORY SCIENTIST – MSMT2]. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
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Administrator Officer (1 Post) – Dar
The position of Administrator Officer reports to the Project Manager and is based in Dar es Salaam.
Position Summary
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is seeking an Administrative Officer who will work under the guidance of the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) East Africa (EA) Node’s Project manager; he/she will oversee day-to-day operations across project implementation, administration, coordination and logistics.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Works closely with the PM in supporting, managing, implementing project activities, performing administrative functions and providing support to staff – may include office keep-up, appointments, ordering/follow up supplies, organize meetings, and documenting meeting minutes and other reports.
- Working with PI/Co-PI and PM, support the processes on hiring and recruitment of project staff, providers or other services needed by the project.
- Works closely with PI/Co-PI and PM in tracking progress of the deliverables and performance indicators, updating milestones, documenting lessons, identifying risks and recommending possible solutions.
- Support the PM in monitoring staff office attendance, confirm leave applications prior to endorsement by the relevant authorities, coordinate annual project staff performance reviews and appraisal.
- Demonstrate decision-making abilities in all aspects of performance.
- Should keep updating and ensure on team compliance institutional regulations, safety regulations and contribute to resolving issues related to the project.
- Interact courteously with other staff when answering questions or providing other information.
- Support the finance team to ensure all project expenses and costs are managed effectively.
- Performing any other duties as may be assigned by the project management team.
Qualification and Experience
Essential
- Minimum Bachelor degree in relevant fields with at least 2 years’ experience working as an office administrator.
- Collaborative knowledge and customer service oriented.
- Ability to multitask, planning and prioritization and to conduct administrative tasks with minimal supervision.
Desirable
- Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
- Proficiency in French is preferred and considered an advantage for this position.
Skills and Competencies
- Good written and verbal communication skills
- Strong skills in decision-making, problem-solving and organizing
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the work place and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Friday 8 November 2024. All e-mail application subject lines should include: [Administrator Officer – MAP EA Node]. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
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Research Scientist (Data Scientist) – (1 post) – Dar
The position of Research Scientist (Data Scientist) reports to the Project Manager and is based in Dar es Salaam.
Position Summary
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is seeking a Research Scientist (Data Scientist) who will support in designing, building and running the software and systems from frontend to backend, that underpin our large-scale solutions to support advances in the study of malaria and associated topics. The role requires both, the business thinking approach and technical expertise around several steps on the development of the analytical tools and architectures for the processing of large amounts of spatial and non-spatial data i.e., design, build, deploy, and maintain. The data scientist is expected to collaborate with postdocs and other modelers within the team to build up the software and systems that provides mature user experience and to a high quality, ensure the smooth delivery and update of production service with no user impact and create world class, robust APIs to enable internal and external users to access our data.
Duties and Responsibilities
Business Analysis
- Proactively work with researchers across the team through all stages of design and testing to ensure that developments meet user requirements.
- Communicate directly with external stakeholders to present options for technical solutions using prototypes, walkthroughs and software demonstrations where appropriate.
Technical Development
- Design, build, test and document developments, working from functional specifications or detailed change requests.
- Provide support and maintenance for production systems.
- Proactively support the productionising of scientific models so that they are scalable, robust and performant.
- Maintain an understanding of data models and technical designs of applications being developed.
- Make performance improvements to models so that we can reach improved levels of scale.
- Identifying and implementing generalizations and abstractions of existing and new data models.
Data Lifecycle
- Develop and maintain pipelines to extract, synthesize and integrate data from various sources, making it available to computational scientific models and user interfaces.
- Develop and maintain tools to facilitate the extraction of needed metrics for malaria modeling from academic papers and other reports.
- Lead the development of web interactive dashboards to examine, manipulate, and process data.
- Lead the development of web interactive dashboards to disseminate the results of MAP modeling efforts.
- Support the process of selection, and implementation of data extraction and manipulation protocols.
- Maintain an understanding of data models and technical designs of applications being developed.
Workplace Safety
- Take reasonable care for your own safety and health and avoid harming the safety and health of others through any act or omission at work.
- Identify and assess workplace hazards and apply hazard controls.
- Report every workplace injury, illness or near miss, no matter how insignificant they seem.
- Abide by institutional policies and procedures.
Qualification and Experience
Essential
- Master’s degree in computer science, software development or related subject area with at least 1 year of experience in data science.
- Experience programming in Java and/or Python.
- Solid expertise and working knowledge with large datasets and relational databases (SQL).
- Knowledge of web front-end technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- Solid understanding of relational and non-relational database design principles.
- Strong understanding of web services or clients consuming web services.
- Ability to pick up new software, frameworks and APIs quickly.
- The ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues at all levels in both verbal and written communications.
- Careful attention to detail and an ability to demonstrate an understanding of the need for source control, continuous integration, coding standards, development methodologies, and documentation in development work.
Desirable
- An understanding of the malaria epidemiology and public health surveillance in malaria endemic countries.
- Master’s degree level in computer science, software development or related subject area.
- An understanding of distributed data processing methodologies and frameworks.
- Experience with clustering and containerization technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker etc).
- Experience with at least one public cloud environment (e.g., Google Cloud Platform, AWS, etc.).
- Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
Skills and Competencies
- Excellent communication skills (oral and written) in both professional and courteous manner.
- Strong software engineering skills.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the work place and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Friday 8 November 2024. All e-mail application subject lines should include: [Research Scientist (Data Scientist) – MAP EA Node]. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
Senior Research Scientist – Postdoc in Geospatial Modelling (2 Posts) – Dar
The position of Senior Research Scientist – Postdoc in Geospatial Modelling reports directly to the Principal Investigator (PI) and is based in Dar es Salaam.
Position Summary
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is seeking PostDocs with advanced modelling skills will contribute to the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) East Africa (EA) Node’s mission and objectives of developing and employing cutting-edge advanced geospatial analytical architectures to understand the risks and estimating the burden of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax malaria, assessing the impact of interventions across various levels and settings at global, regional and national to provide the National Malaria Control Programmes (NMCPs) with the quality evidence to guide optimal allocation of resources in malaria endemic countries. The post-docs are expected to follow coding and data-management standards, develop methodologies that can be utilized by others within the team and/or used in a complex analytical pipeline. As a scientific achievement, postdocs should take leadership in the preparation of scientific reports and journal articles for publication of research findings from their work in open access journals but also contribute to the team communication strategies.
This role will also involve collaboration with a wide range of malaria stakeholders, translating model outputs to NMCPs and communicating the utility to the malaria decision, building and strengthening analytical skills to others through training, mentoring and supervision.
Duties and Responsibilities
Geospatial modelling and coding standards
- To provide statistical expertise in development and implementation of spatiotemporal models to respond to a variety of malaria research questions related to risk estimations, estimating of morbidity and mortality, understanding transmission profiles, and optimizing the impact of interventions
- To guide others and contribute to the best presentation of outputs from analysis, interpretation of results and relevant conclusions.
- Manage own academic research and administrative activities, including small-scale project management to coordinate multiple aspects of the work to meet deadlines.
- Lead collaboration and engagements with NMCPs to translate and communicate MAP’s modelling efforts, products, and outputs to foster utilization and uptake.
- Work with the data scientist and data engineering team on creating data-pipelines, setting up computation infrastructure and managing NMCP’s data and outputs requests.
- Work collaboratively with other scientists within the wider MAP group to produce estimates of malaria, acting as a source of information and advice to other members of the group.
- Apply due diligence by scrutinizing model results for all project deliverables, reviewing and refining theories as appropriate.
- Maintain rigorous data- and code management practices, including thorough documentation and version control, to ensure data replicability and cross-compatibility with past and future MAP products.
- Contribute ideas for new research projects and for generating research income.
- Contribute to and, as appropriate, lead, in the preparation of scientific reports and journal articles for publication of research findings from this work in open access journals.
- Present the research findings from this work at selected regional and international conferences and meetings.
- Travel to collaborators in different MECs, Europe, the United States, Africa, and Asia.
Workplace Safety
- Take reasonable care for your own safety and health and avoid harming the safety and health of others through any act or omission at work.
- Identify and assess workplace hazards and apply hazard controls.
- Report every workplace injury, illness or near miss, no matter how insignificant they seem.
- Abide by institutional policies and procedures.
Qualification and Experience
Essential
- PhD in biostatistics, mathematics, or a similar quantitative discipline with epidemiological knowhow.
- Expertise in Bayesian modelling using Gaussian processes with demonstrable understanding of the issues arising from scaling these models to a global scale, validation, assessing performance and sensitivity analysis.
- Experience of multi-metric analysis and covariate selection in the context of modelling large and complex data with spatial correlations.
- Experience of state-of-the-art statistical software libraries such as INLA, TMB or similar packages.
- Demonstrable commitment to using best practices in writing code, including the use of source control, code documentation/repositories, and coding standards.
- Experience of working with national disease programmes, managing relationships with senior stakeholders, data-owners, and collaborators.
- Experience in research design and implementation, analyzing routine health data in LMICs hence good understanding of challenges on data utilization and quality issues in low resource settings.
- Ability to manage own academic research, mentoring junior staff, define and meet milestones on time.
- Demonstrable evidence of having worked successfully within a collaborative, team-based research setting.
Desirable
- An understanding of the malaria epidemiology and public health surveillance
- Track record of scientific publications in high quality peer-reviewed journals in the areas of epidemiology, modelling or health system research
- Experience of working with NMCPs, understanding of malaria surveillance including using DHIS2.
- Knowledge and experience in working with ministries of health in LMICs, funding agencies and bilateral organizations.
- Experience in developing and delivering training for different audiences;
- Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.
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Skills and Competencies
- Excellent communication skills (oral and written) in both professional and courteous manner.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., R/Python, Stata), knowledge of other statistical software and data visualization applications.
Remuneration
An attractive and competitive remuneration package will be offered to successful candidates as per IHI salary scales.
Equal Opportunity
IHI is an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit intentional biases or discrimination and harassment of any kind at the work place and during recruitment. All employment decisions are based solely on job requirements and individual qualifications, and our recruitment process is governed by the labour laws of Tanzania.
Mode of Application
All candidates who meet the above job requirements should send their application letters together with their detailed curriculum vitae (CVs) showing contact addresses including email, telephone/cell phone numbers and copies of academic and professional certificates to the email address below.
The deadline for this application is 17:00 hrs on Friday 8 November 2024. All e-mail application subject lines should include: [Senior Research Scientist – MAP EA Node]. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for interview.
Human Resources Manager
IFAKARA HEALTH INSTITUTE
Plot 463 Mikocheni
P.O. Box 78,373
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Email: recruitment@ihi.or.tz
