Open Data Specialist, HHMI Janelia, USA

Janelia Research Campus is a pioneering research center in Ashburn, Virginia, where scientists pursue fundamental questions in neuroscience and imaging. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) launched Janelia in 2006, establishing an intellectually distinctive environment for scientists to do creative, collaborative, hands-on work.   Our integrated teams of biologists, computational scientists, and tool-builders pursue a small number of scientific questions with potential for transformative impact.  We share our methods, results, and tools with the scientific community.  It is a uniquely innovative and collaborative atmosphere that reflects HHMI’s reputation for excellence.

Summary 

Janelia scientists have made important technical breakthroughs in imaging, connectomics, data analysis and visualization, and other areas, and have applied them to begin to crack some of the biggest problems in Neuroscience.  Janelia is now investing in three long term concurrent research programs (currently MCN and 4DCP) alongside core research areas (C&T and MTI) and project teams.  These programs will produce unprecedented high-quality scientific data that we plan to provide to the scientific community in the most efficient and productive way possible.  We believe that Open Science enables efficient dissemination of data and accelerates scientific discoveries.

The Open Data Specialist supports research projects by identifying, developing, and helping execute best practices for data formatting, metadata, organization, interoperability, rapid dissemination, storage as well as data usage tracking. In practice, the Open Data Specialist works with labs and teams involved in a project to develop these best practices for all data processing stages from acquisition to analysis and public deposition, supports the labs to streamline data flow, consolidates data, and documents datasets and processing pipelines. Additional responsibilities may include the provision and application of tools to convert between different data formats and the development of reproducible workflows.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• In close collaboration with developers, scientists, and engineers, identify and develop optimal standards, formats, storage plans, and data flows, for data generation processing, archiving, and publication.
• Collaboratively develop and update standards for data formats, meta-data, organization, and storage.
• Collaboratively develop data acquisition, annotation, and processing procedures that meet these standards.
• Document datasets and dataflows

For additional information please check the job offer.