HEALTH DATA INFORMATICS CONSULTANT

Job Description The Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC), through the Center for Public Health Science and Innovation (PHSI), seeks an Informatics Fellow to provide consulting services supporting data analysis, surveillance, and decision support activities. This work will support health topics across the commission including heat events, infectious disease outbreak detection, monitoring, and response, and will particularly focus on mass gathering preparedness for the FIFA World Cup and Summer 2026 events. This is an independent contractor role (1099-NEC). The consultant will contribute to strengthening biosurveillance infrastructure and real time situational awareness for the City of Boston. Duties and Responsibilities • Develop analytic protocols and reproducible code to support routine public health surveillance • Conduct data cleaning, quality assurance, and management of large, complex datasets • Perform timely epidemiologic analyses, including handling temporal misalignment across data sources • Integrate and analyze data across multiple systems, including case based surveillance, syndromic surveillance, immunization systems, wastewater data, and federated EMR networks • Produce clear, actionable outputs including data visualizations, dashboards, summaries, and talking points for technical and non technical audiences • Build and maintain interactive dashboards to support real time situational awareness and decision making • Collaborate with Informatics, Infectious Disease Bureau staff, and cross functional Data Acute Response Teams (DARTs) • Participate in regular meetings with project leads to support surveillance priorities and response efforts • Utilize version control and collaborative workflows (GitHub, Posit Workbench) to ensure reproducibility and coordination Minimum Qualifications • Graduate student, doctoral candidate, postdoctoral fellow, or recent graduate with relevant training and experience • Demonstrated ability to independently run routine surveillance metrics and analyses for outbreak detection and monitoring • Strong analytic skills, including experience working with large, complex public health datasets • Proficiency in R and RStudio • Experience developing dashboards, preferably in Power BI • Experience with data integration across multiple sources Preferred Qualifications • Prior experience with public health surveillance systems such as MAVEN and NSSP • Experience with immunization, wastewater, or EMR based data systems • Experience with Dev, Test, Prod workflows and version control using GitHub integrated with Posit Workbench Engagement Details • Duration: May 2026 through September 1, 2026, with potential extension • Effort: Minimum 20 hours per week, up to 40 hours per week based on availability and project needs • Work arrangement: Primarily remote, with occasional in person meetings Compensation and Invoicing • Hourly rate: $35-60 per hour, commensurate with experience • Consultant will invoice monthly for actual hours worked • Invoices must include: unique invoice number, invoice date, dates worked, hours worked, hourly rate, and brief summary of daily tasks • All invoices must include a BPHC purchase order number and be submitted to accountspayable@bphc.org