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Research Data Web Developer

The EPA National Student Services Contract has an immediate opening for a full-time contractor position; Research Data Web Developer with the Office of Research and Development at the EPA facility in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Salary: $22.91 per hour.

Travel: No travel will be required.

Required Skills:
  • Demonstrated training and experience in computational skills;
  • Proficiency in programming, including proficiency in one or more of the following languages: JavaScript, Python, R, Java, or SQL;
  • A working knowledge of relational databases;
  • Experience with scientific data in at least one of the following fields or closely related fields: ecology, toxicology, environmental science, and epidemiology;
  • Strong written, oral and electronic communication skills; and
  • Experience working well as a team.


Desired Skills:
  • Experience with machine learning implementation is a plus.


Qualifications
  • Be at least 18 years of age and
  • Have earned at least a Bachelor’s degree in a basic or applied science (e.g. computer science, information science, bioinformatics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, ecology) from an accredited university or college within the last 24 months and
  • Be a citizen of the United States of America or a Legal Permanent Resident.


EPA ORD employees, their spouses, and children are not eligible to participate in this program.


What the EPA project is about
EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) is a leader in the science of human health and ecological risk assessment, a process used to determine how pollutants or other stressors may impact human health and the environment.

ORD addresses the needs of stakeholders by preparing technical reports and assessments that integrate and evaluate the most up-to-date research. These products serve as a major component of the scientific foundation supporting EPA's regulations and policies. ORD also conducts cutting-edge research to develop innovative quantitative risk assessment methods and tools that: help extrapolate between experimental data and real-world scenarios, improve our understanding of uncertainties, and facilitate careful weighing of evidence using approaches such as systematic review.

The Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO, https://hero.epa.gov/) database provides an easy way to access scientific literature behind EPA science assessments. The database includes more than 2 million scientific references and data from the peer-reviewed literature used by EPA to develop its regulations for the following: Integrated Science Assessments (ISA) that feed into the NAAQS review, Provisional Peer Reviewed Toxicity Values (PPRTV) that represent human health toxicity values for the Superfund, and the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database that supports critical agency policymaking for chemical regulation. In addition, the Health Assessment Workspace Collaborative (HAWC, https://hawc.epa.gov/) is an open-source web-application used by scientists at EPA for extracting and visualizing data extracted from scientific literature to summarize evidence and key findings. Assessments using HERO and HAWC characterize the nature and magnitude of risks to human health and to ecosystems from pollutants and chemicals in the environment.

ORD has been developing a new web application and database named Living Literature Review (LLR) to facilitate the continuous screening and identification of peer-reviewed literature that form the basis of its assessments,. LLR provides automated periodic search, machine-assisted relevance ranking, screening and annotation capabilities to ORD scientists and is currently getting prepared for internal release.


This is an excellent opportunity for a recent Bachelor’s graduate to collaborate with EPA’s research team. Research experience includes:

  • Writing frontend web-application in JavaScript to dynamically display information.
  • Reviewing database exports or other external API systems to determine how existing data can be utilized with web-applications.
  • Creating prototypical data visualizations using new or existing datasets.
  • Networking and exploring many career paths at EPA.


Interested in this research opportunity? If so, follow the link below to apply. Questions? Email EPANSSC@ORAU.org