| Job Summary | |
| Position: | Senior Research Scientist |
| Reports To: | Principal Investigator / Project Leader |
| Work Station: | Dar es Salaam |
| Apply By: | 20th August, 2025 |
Institute Overview
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is a leading research organization in Africa with a strong track record in developing, testing and validating innovations for health. Driven by a core strategic mandate for research, training and services, the Institute’s work now spans a wide spectrum, covering biomedical and ecological sciences, intervention studies, health-systems research, service delivery and policy translation.
Buy vitamins and supplements
Position Summary
Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is seeking a Postdoc Researcher 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.
Duties and Responsibilities
- 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.
Qualification and Experience
- 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
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.