The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The Institute is named in honour of the scientist Alan Turing and its mission is to make great leaps in data science and artificial intelligence research in order to change the world for the better.

The Alan Turing Institute has been awarded a grant by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to deliver a Research Support Facility (RSF) for the £23 million Artificial Intelligence for Multiple Long Term Conditions (AIM) investment. The NIHR AIM RSF team will support researcher teams from around the UK in their efforts to systematically identify new clusters of disease and the development of conditions over the life course.

The NIHR AIM RSF will be delivered jointly between the Tools, Practices and Systems and Health and Medical Sciences programmes, with collaborators from Swansea University, MRC Harwell and the University of Edinburgh. Together they will build capacity and capability in AI and MLTC-M research, foster a collaborative approach and a culture of shared learning, and provide a leadership role to facilitate impact from the AIM investment. The team will use their convening power and expertise to maximise the scientific impact and potential for patient benefit through five themes:

• Reproducible, secure and interoperable infrastructure
• Accessible, research-ready data
• Scientific community building and training
• Public and patient involvement and engagement (PPI/E)
• Sustainability and legacy

The Turing Way is an open source community-driven guide to reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. The project goal is to provide all the information that data scientists in academia, industry, government and the third sector need at the start of their projects to ensure that they are easy to reproduce and reuse at the end.

We are recruiting a Community Manager focused on Open Collaboration who will work to embed the expertise in the TPS, Turing Way and broader open source communities in the AIM consortium to ensure that this investment delivers FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) outputs that are greater than the sum of their parts.

ROLE PURPOSE

The AIM RSF Open Collaboration Community Manager will create, nurture and protect the conditions required for successful technical communication across the diverse and distributed AI for Multiple Long Term Conditions projects.

The ideal candidate for the AIM RSF Open Collaboration Community Manager will treat all members of the AIM investment with compassion. They will support people to share and promote the skills that they already have, understand the experiences of people from a range of diverse backgrounds, and identify what they need to effectively work together. They will actively foster a culture of collaboration.

The AIM RSF Open Collaboration Community Manager will collaborate with experts in the Turing institute and beyond. They will be an active contributor to The Turing Way, acting as bi-directional conduit to implement best practices for reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science.

DUTIES AND AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

• Map expertise, projects and datasets across the AIM research teams. Facilitate diverse and collaborative conversations to identify and prioritise open source software contributions and areas for training to allow everyone to participate in reproducible workflows on GitHub or GitLab.
• Catalyse connections and collaboration between researchers working towards reproducible AI for MLTC research across the UK. This could come in the form of synchronous regular meetings but the discussions may also occur asynchronously, for example, through active engagement on distributed communication channels such as Slack and the maintenance of public and private GitHub repositories.
• Be an active contributor to The Turing Way project exemplifying the practices we want to promote within the community.
• Foster a community of researchers with a particular focus on supporting the PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and members of the public wanting to learn more about delivering data intensive analyses on sensitive data.
• Communicate technical topics to colleagues and external partners by preparing and presenting reports, blog posts, organising and delivering presentations, and taking an active role in meetings and discussions.
• Publish - as a lead or co-author - peer-reviewed research articles, open source training curricula, and/or perspective, opinion and commentary articles, as appropriate. This responsibility will be defined to be aligned with the successful candidate's personal career goals, through collaborative discussion when they are in post.

Please see the Job description for a full breakdown of the duties and responsibilities as well as the person specification.

Essential

• Bachelor's degree or a Master's Degree in a discipline which provides a good basis for understanding statistics, data science and programming.
• Outstanding communication skills, both oral and written.
• Suggests ways of improving working practice and use of resources. Creates realistic plans to effectively manage own workload, prioritising work to meet personal and team objectives.

Experience in:

• Basic coding skills in any programming language.
• Experience managing, structuring and analysing research data.
• An understanding of the importance of good practices for producing reliable software and reproducible analyses (e.g. version control, issue tracking, automated testing, package management, literate analysis tools such as Jupyter and Rmarkdown).

Track record of any combination of:

• Publishing articles, FAIR data sets, and/or open source software libraries for an academic audience.
• Publishing articles, blog posts, for a general audience.
• Publishing white papers or policy briefings for an audience of decision makers in government, industry or the charity sector.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

If you are interested in this opportunity, please click the apply button below. You will need to register on the applicant portal and complete the application form including your CV and covering letter. If you have questions about the role or would like to apply using a different format, please contact us on 020 3862 3546, or email [email protected]

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: 13 February 2022 at 23:59

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This full-time post is offered on a 2.5 year, fixed term contract basis (funding ends October 2024). The annual salary is £37,000-£42,000, plus excellent benefits, including flexible working and family friendly policies, https://www.turing.ac.uk/work-turing/why-work-turing/employee-benefits.

EQUALITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

The Alan Turing Institute is committed to creating an environment where diversity is valued and everyone is treated fairly. In accordance with the Equality Act, we welcome applications from anyone who meets the specific criteria of the post regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

We are committed to building a diverse community and would like our leadership teal to reflect this. We therefore welcome applications from the broadest spectrum of backgrounds.

Reasonable adjustments to the interview process will be made for any candidates with a disability.

Please note all offers of employment are subject to obtaining and retaining the right to work in the UK and satisfactory pre-employment security screening which includes a DBS Check.

Full details on the pre-employment screening process can be requested from [email protected].