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 Health and Medical Sciences Programme at Turing delivers research into the theory and methods of AI, statistics, and data analytics underpinning medical and health applications that will enable scientists to do better science, without compromising respect for privacy and patient trust.

Hoffman La-Roche (Roche) as a company have been committed to improving lives since it was founded in 1896 in Basel, Switzerland. Today, Roche creates innovative medicines and diagnostic tests that help millions of patients globally and was one of the first companies to bring targeted treatments to patients.

The Alan Turing Institute and Roche have recently launched a new programme which will establish a world-leading industry and academic partnership in advanced analytics focused on enabling the transformative benefits of personalized healthcare to become a reality for patients around the world. Roche will be investing £1M per year for 5 years to initiate the partnership.

This strategic partnership will cover multiple activities, with the “North Star” of developing new data science methods to investigate large, complex, clinical and healthcare datasets to better understand how and why patients respond differently to treatment, and how treatment can be improved. Understanding such “treatment heterogeneity” is a problem at the forefront of modern medicine and is an essential first step toward the ambitious goal of developing a personalised healthcare.

We are recruiting a Community Manager who will help to shape the partnership activities by engaging with the relevant Turing and Roche communities. Further details of the partnership can be seen here : The Alan Turing Institute – Roche strategic partnership | The Alan Turing Institute.

ROLE PURPOSE

The Turing-Roche Community Manager will create, nurture and protect the conditions required for successful technical communication across the diverse and distributed Turing and Roche data science communities. We anticipate that the postholder will need to embody core values of stewardship, compassion, and collaboration, in addition to their commitment to equity and inclusion as described in the Turing's "Rules of the Game" (see below).

The purpose of the Community Manager is to develop strong connections between the Turing and Roche research communities working in the field of treatment heterogeneity. They will be responsible for identifying and mapping expertise, projects and datasets within both organisations, identifying the most important and exciting opportunities for collaboration and helping to shape the research direction of the partnership. As a steward of their community, the Community Manager will see how individual pieces fit together as a whole. They will also work with external communities - both national and international - to survey the broader research landscape in this area and condense key areas of research for the partnership to focus on. The postholder will possess the communication, motivation and collaboration skills required to bring the various communities together in this exciting endeavour to define deliverable projects from the many options that are available.

The ideal candidate for the Turing-Roche Partnership Community Manager will treat all members of these overlapping communities 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 identify areas of implicit knowledge and expertise within the Roche and Turing communities and make this information explicit. The Community Manager will have a central role in the partnership by laying the groundwork for inclusive co-creation to improve patient outcomes from the start of our work together.

The Community Manager will collaborate with experts in the Turing community and beyond. They will be an active contributor to The Turing Way, acting as a bi-directional conduit to implement best practices for reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. 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 do not expect the applicants to already have all the skills within the scope of The Turing Way project. Rather that they will develop new expertise and grow in the role. They will also participate in the Tools, Practices and Systems community, particularly in the development of responsible research and innovation practices.

The successful candidate will form part of the Turing’s Health and Medical Sciences programme team, led by Director Professor Chris Holmes and Deputy Director Professor Ben MacArthur and supported by the Business Team for the programme. They will work closely with a wide range of colleagues from across the Turing and Roche. Dr Kirstie Whitaker will be their line manager, with day to day support from Dr Malvika Sharan, co-lead of The Turing Way project.

DUTIES AND AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

• Map expertise, projects and datasets within Roche, Turing and the broader Health Data Science community. Embed our ethical values in research processes and outputs by promoting equitable and inclusive co-creation of Turing-Roche Partnership projects. Facilitate diverse and collaborative conversations to identify and prioritise important and exciting opportunities. Work with all members of the leadership team to shape the research direction of the partnership.

• Foster communities of researchers across the Roche-Turing Partnership, finding both synergies between ongoing projects and emergent opportunities that can only be delivered by the Partnership together.

• Catalyse connections and collaboration between researchers working in the global Roche and national Turing communities. This could come in the form of synchronous regular meetings but – for time zone reasons – it is likely that these discussions will have to 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 community member of The Turing Way project. This may include identifying gaps in the current material, writing new content, reviewing existing chapters, giving presentations about the project to new audiences, welcoming members of your own project communities to join The Turing Way, and contributing to the design of governance and decision making processes. Our vision is to build an interconnected web of open source communities in applied data science. We expect all community managers to attend regular co-working sessions and participate in discussions on research best practices across a project lifecycle.
• Foster a community of postdoctoral researchers. Implement practices - as defined in The Turing Way, and beyond - to ensure these team members demonstrate the highest standards of reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science in their work. Some - but not all - of these practices include:

• Onboard and welcome new community members. This will likely include running 1:1 inductions and continuously updating documentation to ensure that resources remain easy to find for new starters and existing team members alike.
• Design, organise and facilitate innovative, inclusive events - remote and in person - for a broad range of community members and collaborators. These can range from small group focused meetings, through team 'coffee chats' to build community, informal mentorship and training, to collaborative contribution events such as hackathons, documentation sprints, or design scoping workshops.
• Review code, analysis, visualisation and infrastructure process documentation. Support community members to participate in collaborative review using pull requests (GitHub) or merge requests (GitLab). This will likely require proactive 'just in time' trainings in using version control using git, and project management in public or private GitHub repositories, as appropriate.
• Promote the sustainable use of research outputs by facilitating high-quality analysis, modelling and reporting documentation, and training materials, in collaboration with researchers, developers and domain experts.
• Curate and finalise regular newsletter updates to capture impact stories, showcase community member contributions, and share progress for both internal and external audiences.

• 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. Communications may be synchronous or asynchronous, remote or in person, and must be prepared at the appropriate granularity of detail for the audience.
• 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.

Essential

• PhD or equivalent level of professional qualifications and/or experience in data science (broadly defined to include mathematics, statistics, computer science pure or applied) or related quantitative discipline
• Bachelor's degree or a Master's Degree in a discipline which provides a good basis for understanding statistics, data science and programming.
• Experience in:
• Basic coding skills in any programming language.
• Git for version control and Github or GitLab for project management.
• 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).
• Experience managing, structuring and analysing research data.
• Track record of:
• Building and maintaining communities of technical practitioners (in any data science domain), both online and offline.
• Organising and delivering participatory collaborative events for skill building, knowledge exchange, training workshops and conferences for a diverse group of participants.
• Outstanding communication skills, both oral and written.
• Works as a proactive and collaborative member of the community team. Proactively looks for issues or problems and escalates accordingly.
• Networks with others with shared interests, collaborating on projects and strengthening future relations. Actively networks both internally and externally to promote the work and image of the partnership
• Promptly deals with requests related to process improvement and supports the Community with aspects of project management.
• 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
• Gathers data rigorously and conducts robust analysis, questioning assumptions and existing knowledge. Reports findings to the wider community and is able to withstand challenge by relying on evidence gathered and processes used for analysis.
• Commitment to meeting deadlines
• Commitment to EDI principles and to the Organisation values

Please see the Job Description for the full breakdown of the Person Specification.

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 them on 020 3862 3575 or 0203 862 3340, or email [email protected].

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: 29 July 2021 at 23.59

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This full time post is offered on a fixed term basis for an initial 3 years. 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.

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].