Hiring: NIH Postbac Research Training Assistant in Data ScienceDescription:
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is the largest funder of research on mental disorders in the world, with a current budget of over $1.4B. Our mission is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure. The NIH campus (located just outside Washington, DC in Bethesda, MD) is listed on the glassdoor.com 2019 rankings of Best Places to Work.
The Data Science and Sharing Team (DSST) is a new group created to develop and support data sharing and other data-intensive scientific projects within the NIMH Intramural Research Program (IRP). Working closely with the NIH Data Science Community the goal of the DSST is to make the NIMH IRP a leader in open science and data sharing practices. We are looking for a talented student who will soon finish or has recently finished their bachelor's degree to join our team for one to two years as part of the NIH Postbac Intramural Research Training Program.
Responsibilities:
As a trainee, you'll receive a crash course in data science best practices (*e.g. *Data Carpentry and ReproNim) as well as interfacing with specific neuroimaging repositories (e.g. The Human Connectome Project, OpenfMRI, UK Biobank, The NIMH Data Archive). You'll also get a chance to meet and interact with some of the most knowledgeable and accomplished scientists from around the world via the many NIH visiting speaker series.
BUILD
You will work with a team of researchers and developers to build and deploy neuroimaging data processing pipelines for investigators within the NIMH IRP. You will collaborate with and contribute to other projects throughout the world that are building standards and tools for open and reproducible neuroscience (e.g. NiPy, BIDS, Jupyter, etc.). You'll have the resources of the NIH HPC Cluster at your disposal as well as additional help from the AWS cloud. Everything we make is open source and freely distributed.
Our team is committed to the NIMH Mission of understanding and treating mental illness and we believe open, clean data (and lots of it) is crucial to realizing that mission. You will work closely with (and sit next to) the Machine Learning Team who are building the models needed to understand complex brain function.
Qualifications/Requirements:
In your application, please tell us about any exposure you have had to processing pipelines for biomedical imaging data (e.g. fMRI, calcium imaging, electrophysiology, etc.). We also want to hear about your experience coding in languages commonly used in data science such Python or R. We're also interested in student who know a bit about front-end development and visualization with tools like JavaScript and D3. Experience with distributed, high-performance computing tools such as Docker/Singularity and batch processing systems such as SLURM is a plus.
Ideally we're looking for bachelor's students from STEM fields, but there are many paths to data science. If you come from a less traditional field, tell us why you think you’d be a great fit for our group.
We're looking for someone who is excited about advancing the cause of Open Science. If you've ever contributed to open source software, participated in a citizen science project, or even fixed a typo on the Wikipedia, we'd love to hear about it!
How To Apply:
Please take a moment to review the NIH Postbac Intramural Research Training Program to make sure you are eligible and are happy with the (modest) compensation package.
Then email your resume to:
DATASCI-JOBSEARCH@mail.nih.gov
Be sure to specify that you are interested in the postbac IRTA position.
