Public Health Modeler / Analyst / Data Scientist
Medical Countermeasures and Variants Team
Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

HOW TO APPLY

Send a resume and cover letter to Team Lead Dr. Scott Olesen ULP7@CDC.GOV.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) is the newest center in the CDC. Our mission is to use data, modeling, and analytics to respond to outbreaks in real-time to drive effective decision-making.

We aim to transform the way public health data is generated and analyzed, to help ensure the US is prepared for 21st century disease threats, while also improving our response to familiar but dangerous diseases like COVID-19, influenza, and RSV.

The Medical Countermeasures and Variants Team within CFA addresses practical infectious disease modeling and analytics questions related to therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines, and genomics.

Since the team formed in 2023, we’ve worked in partnership with the CDC teams specializing in COVID-19, influenza, RSV, wastewater surveillance, traveler-based surveillance, and clinical genomics surveillance. We’ve responded to urgent requests directly from CDC leadership. We’ve worked directly with pharmaceutical companies to help them anticipate demand for new medical countermeasures. We’ve even responded to requests from the White House to help inform national policy.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Enjoy a remote-first workplace. Live where you want! CFA analysts are spread across the US, from Alaska to Atlanta. Meet your colleagues in person at events at CFA headquarters in Washington, DC and at CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

Think big. CFA will be the largest infectious disease modeling group in the world. We have a team of crazy-good people. We will have the capability to run millions of simulations in minutes. We sit in the CDC, at the nexus of US public health data. If you think things should work better, now’s your chance!

Get the thrill of response but without the burnout. When crisis strikes, CFA dives in, providing rapid support. The rest of the time, we build and improve out tools, so we can work more efficiently. Our dream is a highly flexible and automated toolkit that lets us work nine-to-five in all but the most acute crises.

Start as soon as possible, by end of 2024 at the latest.

You must live in the US by the time you start your job.

WHAT YOU WOULD DO

Be a team player. Our work is complex, so everything at CFA is done as a team. And because our job is to improve decision-making, we always work in partnership with other groups at CDC or in other parts of the federal government.

Be nimble. We are a growing organization responding to unpredictable conditions. Our team members balance rapid response with long-term research and tool-building. We need attention to detail as well as the ability to see the big picture.

Bring your knowledge; grow your knowledge. CFA’s mandate is too broad for any one person to be an expert in everything. Our analysts share their deep expertise while continually building new skills. If you don’t know what causal inference has to do with estimating vaccine uptake, or what the No U-Turn Sampler has to do with calculating vaccine efficacy, don’t worry, because you’ll learn soon enough.

Collaboratively write high-quality code. We use languages like Python, R, Julia, and Rust. We use industry-standard project management tools like GitHub and Jira. We follow developer best practices to ensure scientific integrity, legibility, portability, and reproducibility. We aim for open-source development.

Build models and other quantitative epidemiology tools. We want to take the pinnacle of infectious disease modeling and turn that into robust, adaptable, routine workflows. When faced with new problems, we build new tools. When things are quiet, we refactor, extend, and polish.

Use models and tools to address urgent, real-world problems. Although we will generate new knowledge and publish papers, these are not our primary goals. Our mission is to support decision-making, in real time, at the point of crisis. We might learn something fundamental about, say, the epidemiology of vaccines, but we mostly want to use that knowledge to help CDC devise better policy, or help states and locals better allocate vaccines.

QUALIFICATIONS

• A Masters or PhD in infectious disease epidemiology, biostatistics, applied Bayesian statistics, operations research, immunology, genomics, vaccine biology, or a closely related area
• Experience writing project-level code in Python or R
• Experience in at least one of: infectious disease epidemiology, biostatistics, applied Bayesian statistics, or simulations related to healthcare or infectious disease
• Strong communication skills, including experience presenting complex scientific concepts, datasets, and findings to a diverse audience

SALARY

$74,441 to $167,366, depending on General Schedule grade, step, and location. For example, a grade-12 hire living in Las Vegas would have a starting salary of $87,878, and a grade-13 hire living in Washington, DC would have a starting salary of $117,962.

We are mostly hiring at grades 12 and 13. Candidates’ grades are determined according to US Office of Personnel Management guidelines and CDC guidelines. Years of work experience are an important factor. Employees typically start at step 1 and advance through steps based on time. The entire schedule is routinely adjusted to account for cost-of-living increases, typically by 1-3% per year.

For more information, see: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/2024/general-schedule

BENEFITS

Federal employees receive benefits like health insurance, life insurance, and retirement savings plans. Retirement benefits include a pension, called FERS or Basic Benefit. Under the current rules, if you work for the federal government for at least 5 years, then at age 62, you can begin collecting a pension based on your top salary and length of service.

For more information, see: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pandemic-information/benefits/