Head Of Infectious Disease Modelling

Main duties of the job

Key responsibilities include

• Provide leadership for a team of 15-25 highly technical and multi-disciplinary analysts and data scientists to develop and deliver a range of analysis and data products on health security and public health threats in the UK.
• Ability to design and provide leadership of complex modelling solutions that include Bayesian analysis, deep learning, and spatial modelling.
• Oversee the development of a comprehensive modelling analytical programme, ensuring key customer demands are understood, prioritised and resourced appropriately.
• Deliver analytical outputs (such as statistical analysis and mathematical modelling) to key stakeholders, often working to tight timescales and whilst managing competing demands.
• Communicate and clearly present key insights, up to the most senior levels, from a variety of analytical sources.
• Engage with partners in wider government, academia, and the private sector to gain access to new data sources and information.
• Building and sustaining key partnerships, within UKHSA, nationally and internationally, including the establishment of analytical collaborations.
• Assist communicable disease control, health protection and public health colleagues across the UK during major health protection incidents.
• Supporting the Division and Directorate on responses to Parliamentary Questions and FOI requests.
• Developing the analytical capability across the Division and wider Directorate.
• Supporting wider corporate transformation as a member of the senior leadership team.

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce.

UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.

Essential Criteria:

• Proven assessment and analytical skills (in a government public health policy context) and ensuring analytical outputs (including complex data and analysis) are policy suitable and have clear 'so what’ implications for decision-making.
• Experienced manager and leader of a large team, demonstrating competencies expected at Grade 6 level. This includes inspiring and motivating staff, promoting diversity, building capability, innovation and managing conflicting pressures.
• Experience of building and validating complex Bayesian numerical mathematical/statistical models.
• Proficiency coding in Stan.
• Proficiency coding in R.
• Experience in creating and maintaining cloud-based analysis platforms, with a preference for AWS (Amazon Web Services).
• Expertise in implementing best practice security solutions on cloud-based analysis platforms.
• Experience of leading and designing modelling projects in public health, health protection or epidemiology, including epidemiology for outbreak investigations.
• Experience of working at pace with short deadlines across multiple projects, being flexible and adaptable to change.
• Experience of leading strategic decision support, ideally in a health or national security environment.
• Ability to develop strong positive working relationships with stakeholders quickly to enable effective working across teams and organisations to coordinate activity.
• Strong communication skills (both written and oral) and the ability to communicate and influence seniors and peers. This includes experience of summarising and explaining complex analytical models to seniors in a clear and concise manner.
• Proven ability to deliver at pace on competing priorities in a challenging and complex environment.
• Experience of creating pipelines to collect large amounts of publicly available data using APIs (e.g. web-scraping).
• An undergraduate or master's degree in a quantitative discipline (e.g. mathematics, statistics or data science) with a strong background in modelling and applied statistics.

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