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The The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has an outstanding opportunity for a Project Officer to join their team.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent research center at the University of Washington. Its mission is to deliver to the world timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence to improve health policy and practice. IHME carries out its mission through a range of projects within different research areas including the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors; Future Health Scenarios; Costs and Cost Effectiveness; Resource Tracking; and Impact Evaluations. Our vision is to provide policymakers, donors, and researchers with the highest-quality quantitative evidence base so all people live long lives in full health.

IHME is committed to providing the evidence base necessary to help solve the world’s most important health problems. This requires creativity and innovation, which are cultivated by an inclusive, diverse, and equitable environment that respects and appreciates differences, embraces collaboration, and invites the voices of all IHME team members.

IHME has an exciting opportunity to join the Cancer Team as a Project Officer supporting the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors enterprise (GBD). A systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time, the GBD is the largest and most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. The GBD’s aim is to provide policymakers, donors, and researchers with the highest-quality quantitative evidence base to make decisions that achieve better health. The primary purpose of this position is to ensure the timely production of high-quality estimates on a regular basis, in a way that maximizes efficiency and coordination across the team and enhances team morale. This individual needs to bring high intellectual agility and deft planning and organizational skills in order to push the team to meet high-pressure deadlines for research deliverables. The Project Officer is a key driver in the performance, quality, and efficiency required by the team to routinely produce high-quality, policy-relevant health indicators. This individual must excel at facilitating communication among technical and project staff with varying degrees of experience and from different disciplines.

This position is integral to IHME’s progress on cancer research projects and its production of deliverables such as interactive tools and data visualizations, scientific publications, policy-relevant estimates of health indicators, conference presentations, and materials for non-scientific audiences, such as policy briefings. The Project Officer will manage the results development, production, and dissemination workflow, including cross-cutting coordination between teams within IHME. The Project Officer will help facilitate the modeling of estimates and help to manage various analytic processes that are used to apply innovative analytic methods.

To succeed, the Project Officer must develop a sufficient understanding of team’s intellectual and analytic approach, as well as the inner workings, timelines, and goals. They must also become familiar with the methods and modeling approaches used by the research team. Progress toward project goals and delivery on objectives is crucial to IHME’s success at expanding the quantitative evidence base for population health. Overall, the Project Officer will be a critical member of an agile, dynamic team. This position is contingent upon project funding availability.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Research command
  • Develop a command of the GBD Cancer Team’s intellectual underpinnings, main goals, and the data, methods, and analytic approaches that achieve them. The Project Officer develops an astute understanding of the material presented in journal articles, policy reports, and presentations that result from the projects on which they work.
  • As a knowledgeable resource on the Cancer Team’s intellectual substance, the individual will be integrally involved with helping the team achieve the goals of its projects in their myriad details. Individual must understand complexities of the analytic process itself while being consistently aware of deadlines imposed as part of the larger research portfolio’s mandate.
  • Develop a command of the computational, diagnostic, and data needs of the team and the associated competencies, skills, and resources required to achieve deliverables.

Project Management & Team facilitation
  • Work with faculty, researchers, and staff to set intellectual agendas and translate them into action plans that can be implemented effectively across multiple project participants.
  • Manage workflow components within the team, ensuring clear coordination on data identification, transformation, storage, analysis, diagnostics, critique, and presentation. Help to achieve continual improvements to efficiency and performance and ensure timely completion of key milestones. Manage multiple projects simultaneously with varying deadlines, stakeholders and collaborators, ensuring interim and final project deadlines are on track and communicated in a timely manner.
  • Manage high-quality data collation, cleaning, and integration into the analytic process.
  • Expertly carry out communications, relationship building, and project management with faculty and senior leaders from governmental, nonprofit, research, academic, and donor organizations to attain project goals and facilitate productive collaboration.
  • Help to manage donor relationships, write donor reports, and prepare presentations.
  • Organize and lead research team meetings to coordinate deadlines and address issues and/or problems.
  • Assist the Team Lead in annual goal-setting and scoping processes. Coordinate consultation with other team members.
  • Facilitate assessment of data, methods, and results with colleagues and collaborators. Develop acumen to eventually lead facilitation
  • Coordinate needs and actions across multiple teams internally to ensure data access, analyses, and diagnostics are appropriately connected and undertaken efficiently to produce results in a timely manner.
  • Oversee the publications process for GBD Cancer topic-specific papers, both internally and in collaboration with external drafting author collaborators. This entails all aspect of paper production – including content editing, citation management and formatting. Serve as the point of contact for all GBD Cancer paper-related inquiries and coordinate submission to academic journals.

Supervisory/Management
  • Data Analysts, Data Specialists, and hourly employees (e.g., student assistants, temporary staff), to include hiring and training, assigning work hours, managing workflow, priority setting, contributing to professional growth and performance development, resolving complaints, and provide course-correcting guidance when necessary.
  • Help Cancer Team Lead to identify and carry through on recruitment needs within the team.
  • Mentor Researchers, Data Professionals, and hourly employees by providing guidance in the development of professional skills and helping them to understand how analytic and methodological undertakings link to project deliverables.
  • Uphold strong principles of two-way communication, respectful debate, and engagement with the team and colleagues as a whole to ensure clear communication, documentation, and common understanding of priorities and the rationale behind them.

General
  • Give input to proposals and make recommendations for resource needs on proposed projects in conjunction with the Team Lead.
  • Represent research team work to external audiences, including researchers, collaborators, donors, and other interested stakeholders. Cultivate relationships and manage high-level collaborations as needed.
  • Manage events and meetings with high-level attendees.
  • Directly engage with high-level external partners and collaborators, including decision-makers in government, donor, inter-governmental, and scientific organizations as related to research-specific topics.
  • Formulate effective strategies for motivating research teams and helping to ensure high achievement among all individuals on them.
  • Other duties as assigned.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
Bachelor’s degree in social sciences, sciences, or related field plus three years’ related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
Desired
  • Master’s level degree in related field.
  • Experience using MS Office suite required.
  • Previous experience supervising employees.
  • Previous project management and relationship management experience, organized and detail-oriented, with an ability to work both independently and collaboratively to achieve objectives.
  • Strong desire and ability to learn intellectual content to facilitate highly complex scientific projects.
  • Demonstrated record of oral and written communication skills with multiple audiences required.
  • Strong relationship management skills in order to communicate with stakeholders at multiple levels, including donors, researchers, data providers, administrators, and other external audiences.
  • Adept diplomacy and exemplary interpersonal skills required. Must be agile at forming respectful and rewarding relationships with people with different levels of experience and expertise from a variety of cultural, linguistic, and professional settings.
  • Interest in global health research.
  • Excellent interpersonal skills, a cooperative team player, energetic, able to develop productive relationships with IHME colleagues and external collaborators. Exceptional listening skills and ability to relate to, influence, and coach employees of all levels in the organization.
  • Experience in one or more of the following: coordinating computational and analytic processes; designing and giving training in the social sciences; coordinating systematic reviews and other research-related tasks; facilitating research production activities; organizing and assessing data and results on a large scale.
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced and collaborative environment to manage multiple priorities while coordinating resources needed to meet deadlines.
  • A commitment to working to alongside others at IHME to illuminate the health impacts of systemic racism and to work within IHME to make our organization more diverse and inclusive. See IHME’s DEI statement here: http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/careers/dei.
Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration.

Application Process:  The application process may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process. These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others. Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.