Data Scientist
Evanston, IL

Job Description

Department: IT Research Computing Services

Salary/Grade: ITS/78

Job Summary:

Northwestern is dedicated to providing excellent support for our research community. As a Data Scientist with Northwestern IT Research Computing Services, you will support world-class research from across the university by implementing practical solutions to researchers' data science challenges. In this position, you will:

* Consult with and provide advice to researchers facing a wide range of data challenges,
* Develop and deliver training for students, faculty, and staff on data science, programming, and computational skills, and
* Collaborate with researchers on projects requiring data science, data visualization, or programming skills.

Working with other members of the research data services team and partners across the university, you will provide the data services, resources, and support researchers need.

Research Computing Services consists of specialists who collaborate to support the full scope of computational and data needs of researchers. We facilitate data-enabled research and training across disciplines and fields. We value continual learning, problem solving, and sharing our diverse backgrounds and skills with each other and researchers.

Specific Responsibilities:

* Assess researchers' data and computational challenges or problems and develop strategies to address those problems.
* Communicate the steps necessary to accomplish a data-centered task to researchers of varying levels of technical background and expertise.
* Support researchers by collecting and organizing data, writing scripts and software programs, analyzing and visualizing data, and providing other data science services.
* Write both technical and non-technical documentation of projects, code, and consultations.
* Develop and teach technical workshops on data science, programming, and data management topics for researchers.
* Develop relationships with researchers, schools/colleges, and other university organizations to understand researcher needs and stay aware of other university resources.
* Work together with other Research/IT staff to solve researchers' technical challenges across service areas including computing, data storage, and data workflows.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

* Bachelor's degree.
* Experience working using a range of techniques and technologies to work with complex or messy data.
* 2+ years combined work experience and/or post-baccalaureate education in a related field.
* Knowledge of Python or R at a sufficient level to fulfill other competencies and job accountabilities.
* Ability to effectively communicate technical details to a non-technical audience.
* Ability to summarize, explore and visualize more than one type of data, such as numeric, text, time series, network, spatial, or categorical data.
* Data wrangling, data manipulation, and data processing skills to convert data between formats, clean data, process multiple data files, and extract data.

Preferred Qualifications: (Education and experience)

* PhD in any field involving quantitative research.
* Experience working on data-intensive projects outside of coursework.
* Experience working with academic, industry, or non-profit researchers.
* Experience teaching technical and computational skills.
* Ability to apply good data visualization and design principles to effectively communicate complex research data.
* Text analysis skills with the ability to process text documents, extract structured data from unstructured text, and apply natural language processing techniques.
* Ability to help researchers with one or more additional programs, languages, or skills, such as, but not limited to: Stata, SAS, MATLAB, JavaScript, SQL, git, bash, high performance computing (HPC), Julia, Spark, TensorFlow, machine learning.
* Familiarity with social science research practices and scholarship

Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer of all protected classes, including veterans and individuals with disabilities. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States.