Public Health Scientist

We are seeking a Public Health Scientist to support an exceptional opportunity to work alongside leadership and to bridge the gap between complex scientific analysis, impactful communication, and community engagement. This position is funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant for the CitiesLEAD project.  

CitiesLEAD is a collaboration between Big Cities Health Coalition, Boston Public Health Commission and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health to create a national network to close the life expectancy gap by place and race. Sixteen cities participate in the CitiesLEAD: Increasing Life Expectancy through Collective Action and Data to receive technical assistance, data analysis, and peer-learning opportunities to translate life expectancy data into action. The Boston Public Health Commission, whose Live Long and Well population health equity agenda is the national model for CitiesLEAD to address life expectancy gaps, serves as the founding health department and implementation partner. 

Working under the guidance of the core CitiesLEAD team at BPHC, the Public Health Scientist will develop documentation on the implementation of the Live Long and Well agenda. The Public Health Scientist will collaborate closely with leadership teams across the CitiesLEAD teams to ensure crucial health information is conveyed with clarity. 

Reporting to the Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of Public Health, will translate technical data into compelling stories, help cultivate public trust, and build active data science communities. Responsibilities include helping manage digital platforms, supporting and hosting educational events, and fostering collaborative networking. 

This role ensures the accurate and accessible dissemination of research findings and technical information to diverse audiences, including stakeholders, academic peers, and the public. By employing expertise in research synthesis, manuscript development, and editorial precision, the position supports the creation of high-quality publications and reports that advance knowledge, inform policy, and contribute to evidence-based decision-making in public health. The ideal candidate will have a demonstrated interest in population health dynamics and social determinants of health. Competitive applicants will have superior writing skills, robust quantitative skills, and an aptitude for translational research in population health and social epidemiology.   

Essential Functions 

• Translate intricate data science models, findings, and complex projects into digestible content for non-technical stakeholders, the media, and the public. 

• Supporting and fostering engagement through active networking platforms, tech hubs, and local meetups. 

• Hosting webinars, training sessions, and collaborative forums designed to demystify data analytics. 

• Monitoring community growth, participant feedback, and engagement metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of outreach campaigns. 

• Apply complex data management and a variety of intermediate and advanced statistical techniques and technical skills to promote the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data arising from epidemiological/research studies. 

• Collaborate on the design of epidemiological projects including assisting in providing statistical expertise in study design. 

• Assist in the documentation and developing system processes for data pipeline.  

• Support and help obtain approval from Institutional Review Board, if needed, including help develop protocols and procedures for conducting epidemiological studies.   

• Lead in preparing preliminary plan for analysis of epidemiological projects; present such plans to leadership team, prepare final analysis plans based on team input. 

• Lead and actively participate in the preparation of written reports and oral presentations summarizing data analysis results, including detailed description of statistical methods, detailed analysis of results, and synthesis of conclusions from summary tables for internal and external meetings, scientific conferences, and academic journals. 

• Collaborate effectively in a team environment. 

• Conduct critical literature review of epidemiological and surveillance studies. 

• Keeps abreast of the latest statistical modeling and computing tools.  

• Perform other duties as directed. 

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of the fundamentals and principles of social determinants of health, epidemiology, biostatistics, geographic information systems, spatial analyses, public health, and data visualization. 

• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills are paramount. 

• Familiarity with multiple data science tools, setting up data pipelines for dashboards.  

• Proficiency with social media, digital communication platforms, and content creation tools. 

• Strong interpersonal skills to build and maintain community partnership. 

• Ability to perform advanced statistical analysis and spatial data manipulation, cleaning, and analyses of very large datasets, including spatial datasets. 

• Knowledge and application of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements and protection of health information. 

• Willingness to learn and apply new statistical and computing techniques to forward the epidemiological work of the commission. 

• High level analytical and problem-solving skills.   

• Completes assignments in a timely and efficient manner. 

• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple tasks and work independently. 

• Demonstrate reliability and integrity. 

 

Education/Experience 

• Doctoral degree in epidemiology, population health, public health, biostatistics, statistics, or related field; three (3) years of related work experience doing advanced data wrangling and statistical analysis, particularly to assess health inequities and understand the connections to social determinants of health. 

• Experience in engaging with communities about data insights and communicating about complex data findings is highly preferred. 

• Experience in coordinating complex projects. 

• Experience in reporting and visualization of public health or epidemiologic data. 

• Advanced knowledge and experience with statistical software – R or R studio, SAS, Python, SQL, Power BI strongly preferred. 

• Advanced knowledge and experience of GIS applications and software such as ArcGIS or QGIS or mapping packages in R is highly desirable. 

• Experience with version control systems, in particular Git and GitHub.  

• Advanced knowledge and experience or willingness to learn machine learning, web scraping strongly preferred. 

• Experience in management, cleaning and analyzing data.