The EPA National Student Services Contract has an immediate opening for three full time Data Curator positions with the Office of Research and Development at the EPA facility in Research Triangle Park, NC.

The Office of Research and Development at the EPA supports high-quality research to improve the scientific basis for decisions on national environmental issues and help EPA achieve its environmental goals. Research is conducted in a broad range of environmental areas by scientists in EPA laboratories and at universities across the country.

What the EPA project is about

The Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure (CCTE) supports ORD by providing solutions-driven research to rapidly evaluate the potential human health and environmental risks due to exposures to environmental stressors and ensure the integrity of the freshwater environment and its capacity to support human well-being. CCTE researchers are developing and applying cutting edge innovations in methods to rapidly evaluate chemical toxicity, transport, and exposure to people and environments. Within CCTE, the Scientific Computing & Data Curation Division (SCDCD) develops the knowledge and information architecture necessary for integrating, transforming, and managing large scale data streams related to assessing the risk of chemicals. SCDCD creates and manages online tools and ensures compatibility with existing chemistry, toxicology, and other experimental data sources.

What experience and skills will you gain?

As a team member, you will support research under the Chemical Safety for Sustainability (CSS) research program providing structured and computationally accessible data to support tiered toxicity testing of chemicals. CCTE’s Concentration vs. Time Database (CvTdb) contains data describing in vivo toxicokinetic experiments measuring the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of chemicals by the body. Toxicokinetic information is needed to understand the risks posed by chemicals in the environment to the public health.

The team member will assist with support of data needs, including confirming presence of relevant data in machine-identified peer reviewed publications, critically reading scientific literature, populating relevant information from publications using machine learning or manual curation into a standard template, reformatting existing data into a standard template using scripting, and performing basic summaries and analyses of toxicokinetic data.

How you will apply your skills

• Confirming automated literature search results;
• Extracting data and metadata from scientific publications or datasets into templates according to standardized procedures;
• Perform quality control checks on database records;
• Creating and managing scripts to interact with databases;
• Developing or running tests to ensure data integrity; and
• Utilizing a code repository in BitBucket.

Communications-related responsibilities will include:

• Contribute verbally (in person or online) and through written communication with an interdisciplinary team of developers and scientists to ensure development and resulting data products uphold scientific domain requirements;
• Respond to and create Jira tickets describing work-related tasks;
• Contribute to improvement of standard operating procedures and other task descriptions;
• Create data visualizations and presentations to communicate results to stakeholders;
• Thoroughly document all work as directed by EPA mentor to comply with EPA quality assurance procedures for transparency and reproducibility of work;
• Present work in internal reports/memos to be used by EPA scientists; and
• May have the opportunity to present work at scientific conferences or contribute to scientific manuscripts.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Work Experience, and Education

• Experience with R or Python programming languages;
• Coursework related to toxicology; and
• Strong reading comprehension skills and experience logically interpreting pieces of information from a variety of data source types.

Desired Knowledge, Skills, Work Experience, and Education

• Coursework in differential equations (for understanding toxicokinetic models); and
• Experience with databases (e.g. MySQL).

Location: This job will be located EPA’s facility in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Salary: Selected applicant will become a temporary employee of ORAU and will receive an hourly wage of $23.37 for hours worked.

Hours: Full-time.

Travel: Travel related to the position is not anticipated.

Expected start date: The position is full time and will begin May 2024. The selected applicant will become a temporary employee of ORAU working as a contractor to EPA.

For more information, contact EPANSSC@orau.org. Do not contact EPA directly.