Research Scientist at Ifakara Health Institute 26-03-2026

Job Description

Ifakara Health Institute is seeking a qualified Research Scientist who will be based in Dar es Salaam to work with the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) East Africa (EA) Node team and play a significant and strategic role in continuously assisting core researchers while improving the data science capability and contributing to the development of analytical models, preparing input data, deploying workflows, and disseminating results, including writing reports, papers for peer-reviewed publication, posters, etc., and engaging with relevant collaborators. Each RS will be allowed to design and implement his/her project with specific deliverables contributing to MAP's overall objective and scope.s.

Responsibility:

• Data gathering and processing
• 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.
• Provide direct support to geospatial modellers including conducting high quality epidemiological analyses to support strategic analytics for global, regional, national and sub-national projects.
• Perform extensive literature reviews, data mining/extraction and other information from published literature, official reports and other sources as needed.
• Obtain, manage, and conduct preliminary processing and analysis on a variety of datasets, such as geo processing data for surveys, health facilities and data cleaning for surveillance type data (e.g. DHIS2, DHS/MIS/MICS).
• Utilize software including Excel, ArcGIS/QGIS, SAS, STATA, and R, Python and others to examine, manipulate, analyse and process data, create high-quality data visualizations for reports, publications and dissemination activities.
• Select, follow, and adapt data extraction and manipulation protocols.
• Promote the best practice on use of data and conduct analytics by being responsible with others for general IT housekeeping, maintenance of b ack-ups, documentation of protocols, data processing procedures, and review of procedures.
  
  Dissemination and publications
• Understand and abide by the protocols of engaging with project stakeholders for effective collaboration. Contribute to creation of text, maps, figures and other materials as requested for scientific reports, posters, peer-reviewed publications, to be credited via co- authorships.
• Contribute to discussions and translating research findings with colleagues and collaborators including sharing and presenting results to partner institutions and various audiences with different technical understanding.
• Provide mentorship, supervision and training to key partners (e.g. NMCPs), interns, students and internal staff when needed on data science and spatial analytics for public health.
• Maintain the confidentiality of unpublished research data.
  
  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.
  
  

Skill :

• Desired Skills
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., R/Python, Stata), knowledge of other statistical software and data visualization applications
• 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.
• 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.
• Demonstrable commitment to using best practices in writing code, including the use of source control, code documentation/repositories, and coding standards.

Qualification Required:

• Essential Qualifications
• Completion of a master's degree in a relevant subject area i.e., statistics, mathematics, data/computer science/engineering, or a similar quantitative discipline, public health, epidemiology and ecology related fields with strong quantitative capacity will be considered.

Experience :

• Required Experience
• 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.
• 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.
• Knowledge and experience in working with ministries of health in LMICs, funding agencies and bilateral organizations
• Experience of multi-metric analysis and covariate selection in the context of modelling large and complex data with spatial correlations.
• Experience of working with NMCPs, understanding of malaria surveillance including using DHIS2.
• Experience in developing and delivering training for different audiences.

Preferred Language Skill :

• Preferred Language
• Excellent communication skills (oral and written) in both professional and courteous manner.
• Knowledge of other languages including Swahili, French, Spanish, Portuguese.

Job Opening date : 25-Mar-2026
Job closing date : 12-Apr-2026

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