IHME has an exciting opportunity to join the team as a Project Officer on the Pandemics team. IHME’s Pandemics team focuses on generating COVID-19 projections for the globe by developing and conducting novel analysis to measure the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary purpose of this position is to ensure the timely production of high-quality estimates on a regular basis, in a way that maximizes efficiency and coordination across the team and enhances team morale. This individual needs to bring high intellectual agility and deft planning and organizational skills in order to push the team to meet high-pressure deadlines for research deliverables. The Project Officer is a key driver in the performance, quality, and efficiency required by the team to routinely produce high-quality, policy-relevant health indicators. This individual must excel at facilitating communication among technical and project staff with varying degrees of experience and from different disciplines. 

This position is integral to IHME’s progress on pandemics research projects and its production of deliverables such as interactive tools and data visualizations, scientific publications, policy-relevant estimates of health indicators, conference presentations, and materials for non-scientific audiences, such as policy briefings. The Project Officer will manage the results development, production, and dissemination workflow, including cross-cutting coordination between teams within IHME. The Project Officer will help facilitate the modeling of estimates and help to manage various analytic processes that are used to apply innovative analytic methods.

To succeed, the Project Officer must develop a sufficient understanding of the Pandemics team’s intellectual and analytic approach, as well as the inner workings, timelines, and goals. They must also become familiar with the methods and modeling approaches used by the research team. Progress toward project goals and delivery on objectives is crucial to IHME’s success at expanding the quantitative evidence base for population health. Overall, the Project Officer will be a critical member of an agile, dynamic team. This position is contingent upon project funding availability.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Research command

• Develop a command of the intellectual material, and the relevant data, methods, analytic approaches, and results. The individual is expected to develop an astute understanding of the material presented in journal articles, policy reports, and presentations that result from the projects on which they work.
• Become thoroughly familiar with the details of complex interdisciplinary projects included in the Pandemic Team’s portfolio, including their goals, objectives, and activities. As a knowledgeable resource on a project’s intellectual substance, be integrally involved with all processes and key activities during the lifecycle of the project and be able to summarize the project’s progress to internal and external audiences.
• Develop a command of the computational, diagnostic, and visualization needs of the portfolio and the associated competencies, skills, and resources required to achieve the research goals.

Project management

• Facilitate routine and timely development, production, and dissemination of results for complex projects involving cutting-edge quantitative data collation, analyses, and tools for dissemination.
• Turn intellectual agendas set by researchers into action plans that can be implemented effectively across multiple project participants to achieve demanding and time-sensitive project milestones. Confidently and effectively participate in project assignments with a solid grounding in project specifics and current status. Track progress and manage coordination and communication across the team.
• Drive research forward by managing dynamic teams of researchers and professional staff. Monitor and assess adherence to data and code quality protocols among researchers, data professionals, and other staff; track progress against deadlines; and help resolve roadblocks.
• Expertly carry out communications, relationship building, and project management with faculty and senior leaders from governmental, non-profit, research, academic, and donor organizations to attain project goals and facilitate productive collaboration.
• Manage high-quality data collation, cleaning, and integration into the analytic process.
• Develop study protocols, process descriptions, and training materials to ensure efficient operations across the team.
• Coordinate needs and actions across multiple teams internally to ensure data access, analyses, and diagnostics are appropriately connected and undertaken efficiently to produce results in a timely manner.
• Facilitate routine analytic processes and modeling efforts to derive key indicators and estimates based upon set protocols and parameters.
• Monitor, report, and forecast workflow and deadlines through effective portfolio management.
• Coordinate implementation of research code and documentation versioning, improvements to code, and documentation of out-of-code processes.
• Facilitate creation of estimates documentation for the purpose of institutional knowledge sharing.

Supervisory/management

• Supervise Data Analysts, Data Specialists, and hourly employees (e.g., student assistants, temporary staff), to include providing timely feedback and priority-setting guidance to them, hiring, training, completing performance evaluations, and making recommendations for disciplinary action as needed.
• Mentor data professionals by providing guidance in the development of professional skills (e.g., time management, work organization, communication skills).
• Manage overall workflow of team in close collaboration with team lead and senior staff on projects. Develop overall work-plan timeline and task assignments.

General

• Interpret financial reports and budgets.
• Manage events and meetings, including logistical support and materials creation. Participate in internal or external trainings, as needed.
• Formulate effective strategies for motivating research teams and helping to ensure high achievement among all individuals on them.
• Perform additional duties as assigned that fall within the reasonable scope of this position as a member of the Pandemics team and of IHME overall.