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Senior Research Data Support Analyst - Climate & Sustainability

The role

Join the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and use your data and computational skills to help tackle important environmental and sustainability challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and the energy transition.

Successful candidates will provide professional consultation and direct support to researchers engaged in data-intensive projects across the many disciplines in YSE. They will consult with and guide researchers on data pipelines and computational workflow, guiding and helping directly implement solutions. Solution may include data workflow design plans and protocols for maintenance and management of data sets through all phases of research; review progress and assure accuracy and compliance of data being acquired and stored; computational research support, which may range from suggesting to implementing approaches to helping streamline and improve coding efficiency.

Successful candidates will also provider mentorship to less experienced members of the team, and also work with and serve as a liaison between YSE researchers and Yale-wide computational support organizations including the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC), the library and statistics lab, Data intensive Social Science Center (DISSC), the Geospatial Data Research Center, and the Digital Humanities Lab. This position reports to the Sr. Associate Dean or Assistant Dean of Research for the YSE.

Individuals in this position are expected to have the necessary skills to help acquire data from various sources; cleaning, merging, and organizing complex data across multiple projects; improving coding efficiency; and creating data visualizations. Ideal candidates will have practical working experience organizing large data sets in a linux environment, often requiring parallel processing (e.g., dask, spark, dbt), and working in R, python, or SQL environment. YSE research projects may involve working with data set too large to load into RAM all at once; cloud services (i.e. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud); columnar data types, coding collaboration solutions (e.g., GitHub). Successful candidates are expected to have experience with, or by ready to learn, data visualization; statistical methods, machine learning and AI-based methods; geospatial data management, image processing and computer vision; and text to data.

Essential Duties

  • Consult to faculty and researchers regarding their projects and needs related to data infrastructure and processes. Discuss suggested project designs solutions and develop requirements for new university needs and capacities, where needed.
  • Work with procurement and legal teams to assist researchers to locate and acquire more complex data resources. Serve as resource to university on improving these processes as needs arise.
  • Design plans and protocols for maintenance and management of data through all phases of research lifecycle; review progress and assure accuracy and compliance of data being acquired and stored.
  • Provide technical support and computing assistance to faculty and researchers in the university’s social science departments and schools.
  • Investigate new computing technologies (in areas such as hardware, software, and networking, depending on the candidate's interests and expertise).
  • Implement statistical methods for descriptive and causal designs and learn new research methods as needed.
  • Develop technical solutions for archiving and dissemination solutions for research across disciplines.
  • Serve as mentor and resource to less experienced members of team.
  • May perform other duties as assigned.

Required Education and Experience

Bachelor's Degree in a related field and minimum of 7 years of related experience in academic or scientific research support or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Required Skills

  • Demonstrated ability to clearly communicate and document computational workflows.
  • A portfolio capable of demonstrating computation skills mentioned in this job announcement.
  • Proven ability to work on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously and a demonstrated interest in the environment, natural resources, energy, climate change, and/or sustainable development.
  • Proven leadership and workflow management skills, with the ability to mentor others.
  • Proven ability to work with computationally literate scientists who do not have formal computer science backgrounds.

To Apply

Search for job number 86863BR on Yale University's STARS Career Opportunities website and follow the instructions.