Research Data Scientist

About the role

This position serves as a Without Compensation Research Data Scientist within the Office of Research and Development (ORD). The VA Research Program strives to promote Veteran-centered care to improve patient experiences and outcomes across VA healthcare and community settings, and to advance value-driven care by providing Veterans the highest quality care at the lowest financial burden.

Responsibilities

• Processing raw microbiome sequencing data using established bioinformatics pipelines
• Performing sequence quality control, taxonomic and functional profiling, and preparation of analysis-ready feature tables
• Conducting routine statistical summaries, including diversity calculations, simple comparisons between groups, and preliminary visualizations to support downstream modeling performed by senior team members
• Assisting with transferring, merging, and validating microbiome outputs within the secure VA computing environment, ensuring consistency with clinical datasets prepared by the statistics team
• Working closely with the Senior Statistician to troubleshoot data issues, adjust preprocessing steps as needed, and produce preliminary figures and descriptive results for internal discussions
• Contributing to the preparation of study reports, abstracts, and manuscript supplements by generating tables and visual materials
• Supporting ongoing project needs by implementing minor analytical tasks, updating pipelines as new samples or methods become available
• Coordinating with investigators to ensure that microbiome data products align with project requirements

Requirements

Work Schedule: Full time; Monday - Friday; 8:00am- 4:30pm (Without compensation)

Virtual: This is not a virtual position.

Relocation/Recruitment Incentives: Not Authorized.

Permanent Change of Station (PCS): Not Authorized

Qualifications

• Education: Degree: Mathematics, statistics, computer science, data science or field directly related to the position. The degree must be in a major field of study (at least at the baccalaureate level) that is appropriate for the position.
• Experience: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-09. Examples of specialized experience would typically include, but are not limited to performing statistical analysis for clinicians; developing statistical tools for Shared Resources, developing and maintaining data pipelines for microbiome data analysis and visualization using Python and R. Collaborating with researchers to do statistical analyses for various studies, facilitating downstream statistical analysis, providing technical support for research projects by performing sequencing data preprocessing, quality control, and feature extraction.

Prioritize

• Selective Service Registration is required for males born after 12/31/1959.
• Must be proficient in written and spoken English.
• Subject to background/security investigation.

Physical Requirements

The work is predominantly sedentary. Typically, the employee sits comfortably to do the work. However, there will be some walking, standing, bending and carrying of items of moderate weight such as large binders, banker style file boxes, meeting materials, papers, books or small parts. Hand and eye coordination for delicate testing procedures may be the only special physical demand required to perform the work.

Education

Note: Only education or degrees recognized by the U.S. Department of Education from accredited colleges, universities, schools, or institutions may be used to qualify for Federal employment. You can verify your education here: http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/. If you are using foreign education to meet qualification requirements, you must send a Certificate of Foreign Equivalency with your transcript in order to receive credit for that education. For further information, visit: https://sites.ed.gov/international/recognition-of-foreign-qualifications/.