Senior Research Associate-Data Science at Bioversity International

Responsibilities:

• Implement analyses that use data science to understand and map the relationships between climate, conflict, migration, and peace, with a geographically-explicit focus. These analyses will tap into large databases of climate, agriculture, migration, and conflict, and use innovative methods to explore this complex problem.
• Develop methods that to support risk modelling and projection based on climatic and socio-economic data.
• Use analytical skills to support the implementation of national and local-level analyses that feed into the Climate Security Observatory. This will include agriculture and conflict risk analysis, and model-based climate impact and adaptation assessments in the areas (countries, regions) of interest to the Alliance and its partners.
• Automate and document analytical routines and contribute to capacity development of partners as needed.
• Contribute to the writing of high-quality technical notes, project reports, and if of interest also peer- reviewed publications.
• Work collaboratively with the rest of the Climate Security team to develop a deep understanding of the relationships between climate and conflict. The team uses a wide array of approaches spanning the social and natural sciences, and the challenge is to integrate data science approaches with other approaches used by the team.
• Stay up to date with the most recent literature on spatial data science, climate and conflict, climate impacts, adaptation, sustainable agriculture, food systems modelling, and climate risk assessment.
• Contribute to project proposal writing and bilateral fundraising.
• Other tasks as assigned as relevant to expertise and ongoing or future projects.
• Ensuring that risks management are considered in the delivery of the assigned duties and responsibilities.

Requirements

• MSc degree in agricultural science, data science, environmental science, geography, geoinformatics, geospatial, geomatics, with an understanding of climate-related risks, climate impacts, and adaptation in agriculture, and an interest in modelling complex problems.
• Experience working with conflict/peace and linkages to migration is a plus.
• Proven experience with spatial analysis, and handling of large geospatial datasets using R and/or Python is a must.
• Familiarity with Google Earth Engine a plus.
• Experience with collaborative algorithm development.
• Strong familiarity and experience working with large geospatial climate datasets including climate model outputs (e.g., CMIP5/6), historical climate data (e.g., station data, CHIRPS, CHIRTS), and agricultural datasets such as crop yield data, soils data, etc.
• Experience with modelling and forecasting yields, climatic and/or environmental systems.
• Experience in the use of remote sensing data is a plus.
• Specific experience with machine learning approaches, and spatial statistics is a requirement, as is experience handling large databases for modelling and data analysis.
• Excellent/proven English writing skills. Other languages (e.g., French, English, local languages) would be a plus.