Forums:
Deadline is at the 16th of February;
The WorldPop programme (www.worldpop.org.uk), based at the University of Southampton, is seeking to recruit 3 research technicians to assist with spatial demographic analyses in a number of low-income countries around the world. We require enthusiastic GIS analysts to work on high resolution predictive mapping of population distributions and demographics based on household survey, census and bespoke survey data, along with high-resolution geospatial covariate data layers. The work will be foundational to a new collaborative program entitled GRID3 (Geospatial Reference, Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development) with partners at national statistics offices, the Flowminder Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID and UNFPA, and will be used to guide projects ranging from population enumeration to delivery of health programmes and alleviation of poverty. As well as joining the vibrant and well-connected WorldPop and Flowminder Foundation (www.flowminder.org) teams, the right candidates will have opportunities to contribute to high-impact publications. The project work to be undertaken involves:
- Assembling, processing and harmonizing GIS datasets from governments and other organizations to feed into population distribution modelling.
- Assembling and processing large raster datasets for use in population distribution modelling.
- Processing and analysing GIS datasets on population age/sex structures from geolocated household surveys
- Processing GIS boundary files to ensure errors are corrected and can be input to statistical modelling processes
- Undertaking basic processing of the output modelled datasets to construct high resolution age and sex structured population datasets
- Contributing to the design, planning and implementation of training in geospatial methods for governments in low income countries
- Undertaking bespoke processing and GIS analyses in support of the GRID3 project
- Constructing dataset metadata reports and contributing to figure production and scientific manuscript and report writing
- Carry out administrative tasks associated with specified research funding, for example risk assessment of research activities, organisation of project meetings and documentation.
- Contribute to teaching/training run by the WorldPop group
You will have an undergraduate degree where GIS was a major focus or relevant industry experience, with a particular focus on large raster datasets preferred. The project is highly interdisciplinary and as such there is some flexibility to accommodate expertise from a range of cognate disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. geography, demography, statistics, computer science, ecology, epidemiology etc). Experience of computer programming, statistical analysis, running GIS training, data visualization and database design would be advantageous.
You will work under the supervision of GRID3 project scientific leads at the University of Southampton in offices in the centre of Southampton. The positions are for a period of 21 months, with a strong likelihood of extensions to this (subject to funding).
