[ERC CoG EARLY-ADAPT] Software engineer for software development and database design, creation and management

The Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ISGlobal, is the result of an innovative alliance between academic, government, and philanthropic institutions to contribute to the efforts undertaken by the international community to address the challenges in global health.

Location:

Barcelona

What we are looking for

We are seeking a talented and highly motivated software engineer to join the research team of Dr. Joan Ballester at ISGlobal within the framework of various research projects (see “Project information” below), mainly the ERC project EARLY-ADAPT (find details in the next paragraph). The team (see the job description of the other team members here) will be at the forefront of environmental research by creating and analysing a novel database of human health in Europe, which incorporates a range of environmental, socioeconomic and demographic variables and novel digital data streams at different spatiotemporal scales.

EARLY-ADAPT (“Signs of Early Adaptation to Climate Change”) is a 5-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant (ERC-2019-CoG), whose overarching aim is to jointly analyse the multiple drivers of recent trends in human health. Its driving hypothesis is that societies are starting to adapt to climate change, but the effectiveness of early adaptation is heterogeneous in space and time. EARLY-ADAPT will create a daily, continental-wide database with multiple health outcomes, climate variables, seven air pollutants, desert dust and influenza. The database will be used to model the relation between health and the environment, quantify the modifying effect of the societal factors, and perform a predictability analysis to determine the most realistic adaptation scenarios for the projections of future health. The project will allow to detect, understand and quantify the inequalities in adaptation between countries, regions, cities and social groups. More information is available here.

Competences and duties

The candidate is expected to:

• have a MSc in informatics, big data analysis or related areas;
• have experience in database management, server maintenance and the design of new data systems;
• have experience in high performance computing and big data analysis;
• have experience in Linux environment and scripting, and common programming languages such as R, Stata, Python, NetCDF, HDF5 and/or GIS tools;
• have experience with the management and analysis of large datasets, and particularly, health, climate, air pollution and/or satellite data, as well as novel digital data streams;
• be fluent in spoken and written English;
• be willing to work in an inter-disciplinary project team within a highly collaborative research institute.

The main duty of the candidate is to be in charge of the design, creation, harmonisation and management of the research database. This includes the data collection process, the creation of subroutines that automatically download new, real-time or updated datasets, such as climate and air quality forecasts and projections, and the post-processing of large data files to support the research of other team members. The candidate will also be in charge of the generation of software and GIS tools for the analysis of the database, the parallelisation of routines in high performance computing facilities, and the management of the project website. The candidate is expected to closely interact with all the other members of the team, in order to better design and update the database, and address any need in terms of data, programming and specialized software. The candidate is not requested to contribute to scientific research, but any interest in that regard with be taken into consideration.