Student Casual - IDAI Research Assistant (LifeSphere Nexus) - EPS - Grade 6 - 906653
Join to apply for the Student Casual - IDAI Research Assistant (LifeSphere Nexus) - EPS - Grade 6 - 906653 role at University of Birmingham
Student Casual - IDAI Research Assistant (LifeSphere Nexus) - EPS - Grade 6 - 906653
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Join to apply for the Student Casual - IDAI Research Assistant (LifeSphere Nexus) - EPS - Grade 6 - 906653 role at University of Birmingham
Position Details
School or Department: Institute for Data and AI
Job Description
Position Details
School or Department: Institute for Data and AI
Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK
Grade: 6
Positions available: 1
Hourly rate: £16.69 + holiday entitlement
Casual contract from: asap
Closing date: 30/5/25
This vacancy is only open for University of Birmingham students. Please be aware that the vacancy may be taken down early dependent on the number of applications received.
Our offer to you
People are at the heart of what we are and do.
The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.
We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.
The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.
Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham
Background
The Institute for Data and AI (IDAI) promotes excellence in Data Engineering, Data Science and AI theory and practice, ensuring their co-evolution and competent adoption across disciplines to enable transformative, interdisciplinary, impactful data-intensive research. The Institute brings together researchers and educators from across the University around a shared ambition to address grand societal challenges through open collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.
This Research Assistant role will be working alongside researchers or research groups, to enable transformative, interdisciplinary, impactful data-intensive research, associated with the Institute’s Health, Environment, and Resilience research theme;
LifeSphere Nexus is an ambitious university-wide initiative led by the Department of Cancer and Genomics. It aims to bring together rich, multimodal data on human health and the environment. This includes genomic sequences, clinical and imaging records, patient-reported outcomes, air-quality and climate measures, and many more. All of this data will be consolidated into a single, coherent, and queryable resource, along with a human-readable query interface.
There are several aims for the platform: unlocking novel cross-disciplinary studies; giving researchers friction-free, self-service access to high-quality data and insights; creating equitable AI tools that perform reliably for under-represented populations; and accelerating discoveries that translate into better health outcomes.
The first task in this project will be to design and create a pipeline from data ingestion, through extraction, to transformation. This work will focus on data engineering and collaboration with different data owners to build the framework of the platform.
Role Summary
This Research Assistant position supports the development of an interdisciplinary, data-intensive research project, aligned with the Institute for Data and AI’s (IDAI) Health, Environment, and Resilience research theme. Working on the LifeSphere Nexus initiative, the role focuses on designing and developing prototype data ingestion pipelines to consolidate multimodal health and environmental data. The aim is to enable accessible, high-quality datasets that drive equitable AI tools and transformative research outcomes.
Main Duties
* Prototype data ingestion pipeline: Extract, transform, and load data from diverse scientific data sources
* Optimise data retrieval and query performance across different data storage solutions.
* Implement data-quality checks: Create basic validation, logging and unit tests to ensure pipelines can run unattended and produce reproducible outputs.
* Design & develop a knowledge graph scheme based on defined scientific entities and relationships.
* Contribute to producing technical documentation & getting-started material
* Explore LLM / RAG integration: assist the Lead Data Architect in testing natural-language queries over the newly added data and summarise findings in a short internal memo.
* Troubleshoot and resolve data-related issues within the data repository.
* Carry out administrative tasks related directly to the delivery of the research
* Promotes equality and values diversity acting as a role model and fostering an inclusive working culture.
This role may also include the following duties;
* Collect and analyse research data using qualitative methods such as interviews, user feedback, and literature synthesis
* Contribute to the drafting and presentation of research outputs, including short publications or training summaries
* Assist in the development or adaptation of research techniques and frameworks related to digital public sector innovation
* Provide support to team members and any students involved in associated research tasks
* Address project-related challenges and assist in keeping to timelines and deliverables
Person Specification
Essential:
* Degree or equivalent in relevant subject area, e.g. Computer Science, Data Science, Data Engineering.
* Strong proficiency in Python and the Pandas library for data manipulation and analysis.
* Solid understanding of relational database principles and experience working with databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar.
* Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and debugging skills.
Desirable:
* Experience in designing and implementing ETL/ELT processes.
* Familiarity with data warehousing concepts and methodologies.
* Knowledge of large language models (LLMS) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is highly desirable.
* Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j) is a plus.
* Experience with data visualisation tools, such as Matplotlib and Seaborn, is beneficial.
* Strong communication and collaboration abilities.
Essential:
* Ability to work independently and as part of a team
* Degree or equivalent in relevant subject area
* Practical experience of applying the relevant skills and techniques
* Ability to analyse information and communicate effectively
* Ability to access and organise resources successfully
* Knowledge of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010, and how to actively ensure in day-to-day activity in their own area that those with protected characteristics are treated equally and fairly
Seniority level
* Seniority level
Internship
Employment type
* Employment type
Part-time
Job function
* Job function
Research and Other
* Industries
Hospitals and Health Care, Non-profit Organizations, and Government Administration
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