Post date: Jan 21, 2014 6:21:05 PM
What does one do with an education in data wrangling and interpretation? Here's a sample job post that come across my in box recently. My read of the position is that it is probably aimed at a PhD level education with a strong background in stats/machine learning. There are a ton of position like this. Did anyone hear about the fact that Pittsburgh recently hired its very own Data executive? Interestingly, her background is totally different than the one expected in the job ad below. Her degrees are in political science and public administration, and her experiences vary from counting ants (testing the effectiveness of bait) to developing a jail population management dashboard.
-- the ad --
The team is doing really interesting work (e.g. predictive modeling to identify chronic disease patients at risk for hospitalization, modeling to ‘build a better quality scorecard’ for physicians, real-time clinical decision support for clinicians in a variety of areas, GIS visualizations such as in ‘What’s Going Around’, etc). We’ve identified a need on our team for a Senior Data Scientist. While we have a number of team members who now operate as masters-trained statisticians/analysts, we need someone who can lead the process of first-principles problem-solving and analytical innovation (really – academic-style work on a rapid implementation track). There will be opportunities for academic output (though this is not a requirement), and a key feature of the work will be pioneering ways we can use data to help solve problems related to the cost of health care delivery. We’re looking for people who are intensely intellectually curious, who play well with others (we carefully select for likeable people!), and who are up for a challenge.