Senior Epidemiologist

Job Summary

The Senior Epidemiologist will provide technical and statistical leadership for multiple, cutting-edge research projects related to wildfire smoke and population health in British Columbia (BC) and across Canada. The incumbent will be responsible for a range of activities spanning the quantitative research cycle, including data access requests, developing reproducible pipelines for data cleaning and preparation, designing and conducting advanced epidemiologic analyses, and preparing knowledge translation materials, including presentations, reports, and scientific journal articles.

Organizational Status
The Senior Epidemiologist will report to the Dr. Sarah Henderson, who is the Scientific Director, Environmental Health at the BC Centre for Disease Control and a Professor (Partner) at the UBC School of Population and Public Health. The Senior Epidemiologist will work closely with other principal investigators and will oversee the work of other research staff and graduate trainees contributing to the projects at SFU, UBC, BCCDC, Health Canada, uOttawa, and other partner agencies.

Work Performed

• Designs and conducts epidemiologic studies to address multiple and varied research questions related to wildfire smoke and population health, including (but not limited to):

• • Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke and acute respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological outcomes in children and adults

  • Long-term exposure to wildfire smoke and the development of chronic respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological conditions in children and adults

  • Prenatal exposure to wildfire smoke and adverse pregnancy and early life outcomes

  • Wildfire smoke exposure and previously under-studied outcomes such as lab-confirmed infectious respiratory disease, ocular disease, and fungal skin infections

• Consults with senior statisticians to ensure study design and analysis plans are appropriate and minimally biased

• Builds data pipelines to ensure efficient and reproducible epidemiologic analyses across multiple studies

• Supervises and supports other project staff and research trainees on study design, data preparation, analysis, and reporting

• Manages data access requests and amendments for multiple platforms, including the BC Health Data Platform (HDP), the PHSA Platform for Analytics and Data (PANDA), and platforms used by national project partners

• Presents research methods and results to project teams and external audiences, including delivering conference and symposia papers on epidemiologic methods and results

• Leads technical writing and data visualization for high-impact peer-reviewed publications and other project reports

• Supports grant development for further research related to wildfire smoke and population health, including project budgeting

• Other tasks, as required by project leads.

Consequence of Error/Judgement
The Senior Epidemiologist will be responsible for generating statistically defensible epidemiologic evidence to inform provincial and national policy and practice related to wildfire smoke exposure. Errors in this work could lead to spurious relationships and incorrect conclusions that perpetuate into misinformed policy and practice decisions with harmful impacts for the entire population. Wildfire smoke is likely to be the most consequential effect of the changing climate in Canada, and robust evidence is required to guide population health protection in the decades ahead. Due to the use of individual-level administrative health data in these projects, the Senior Epidemiologist must understand and exemplify the ethics of confidentiality, sensitivity, and respect and must uphold the data access policies of all analytic platforms used for the projects.

Supervision Received
The Senior Epidemiologist will be supervised by Dr. Sarah Henderson, and work will be collaboratively guided by Dr. Henderson and other principal investigators on the project teams.

Supervision Given
The Senior Epidemiologist will provide supervision and support for other staff and trainees working on multiple projects. These may include early career epidemiologists, data analysts, biostatisticians, post-doctoral fellows, PhD trainees, MSc trainees, and MPH practicum placements.

Minimum Qualifications
Post-graduate degree in Statistics. Minimum of five years of related experience in integrative analysis, or the equivalent combination of education and experience.

- Willingness to respect diverse perspectives, including perspectives in conflict with one’s own

- Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing one’s own awareness, knowledge, and skills related to equity, diversity, and inclusion

Preferred Qualifications

• A post-graduate degree in statistics, biostatistics, or epidemiology

• Advanced experience with air pollution epidemiology and biostatistics.

• Advanced knowledge of R, Python, SAS or other coding language for data management and epidemiologic analyses.

• Advanced experience linking and working with provincial administrative health data in secure research environments.

• Advanced understanding of population health and determinants of health in BC and across Canada.

• Advanced understanding of the role of research in the policy and practice decision-making processes.

• Strong project and time management skills.

• Demonstrated ability to effectively lead other people, including trainees.

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills.

• Significant experience with scientific peer review and publishing processes is an asset.

• Significant experience with geospatial data analysis is an asset.

• Ability to exercise appropriate tact, discretion and confidentiality in all matters.