Senior Assistant Director/Deputy Director - National Data Curation Team, BDH

Senior Assistant Director/Deputy Director – National Data Curation Team

The Biomedical Data Hub (BDH) curates and maintains strategic deidentified health data cohorts and supports researchers and innovators with expertise in bioinformatics and AI.  Its mission is to act as a trusted research node that unlocks the value of digital health data to support cutting edge science and digital health solutions that will benefit Singapore and Singaporeans.   BDH is a national platform hosted by the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) in partnership with Ministry of Health (MOH) Singapore and is funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF).

As Sr. AD / Dy D - National Data Curation Team you are a member of the Biomedical Data Hub leadership team, responsible for shaping the national biomedical data curation ecosystem across Singapore.  You will lead a small coordinating office with two core responsibilities:

1) Form and coordinate project-based teams to curate and onboard de-identified biomedical datasets into Biomedical Data Hub.  You will drive outcomes such as improved data quality, semantic and syntactic interoperability, and AI readiness of data to enable research and innovation.  Activities may include curating messy, incomplete and heterogeneous data, reconciling clinical definitions across institutions, and ensuring adherence to minimum information standards. Team members maybe at BDH, A*STAR, healthcare institutions, other public sector agencies, or universities.

2) Establish and coordinate domain-specific data working groups that include clinicians, clinical and bio-informaticians, and researchers. These working groups would decide on and adapt data standards for various data modalities and scientific/clinical domains, resolve ambiguities in clinical definitions, coding practices and data curation issues, and adopt practices to maximise data interoperability and reusability.

Additionally, you will translate between clinical language, data owner concerns and technical terms, build trust with data owners and data custodians by demonstrating understanding of their operational and regulatory constraints, shape national strategies to uplift biomedical data curation practices across institutions and level-up Singapore's data and data curation ecosystem.  

In all cases, your ability to influence across organisational boundaries will be tested daily as you and your team will be called upon to resolve technical and non-technical challenges to data curation, including stakeholder management.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with research and healthcare data owners and other stakeholders to understand data provenance, limitations, intended use and curation requirements of various data types
• Develop and implement operational model for a national data curation team that allows BDH to address a wide array of data types and curation use cases, meet its service-level commitments while maintaining cost
• Establish and collaborate with expert working groups on data modalities of interest. This includes health data, imaging (clinical and cellular) and multi-omics data, to be prioritised based on research objectives.
• Develop and implement strategies for metadata and data curation, standardisation and clean-up to create research- and AI-ready datasets as well as facilitate data discovery.
• Identify, develop and promote data standards based on international best practices and alignment with local research needs. Where data standards are immature, baseline current state and develop adoption roadmaps.
• Keep pace with evolving data standards and curation best practices for implementation within BDH
• Scope and size data curation/clean-up projects using human curators and automated tools;
• Evaluate and advocate for adoption of new technologies (e.g. AI data curation) as appropriate (also development of tools as a community resource)
• Create and update operating procedures, as required to build-up BDH capabilities
• Define KPIs and metrics to measure data curation quality and productivity
• Monitor performance of data curation projects to assess performance of teams and technology
• Work with data stewards and other stakeholders to ensure research objectives are met

Requirements

• Degree in Bioinformatics, Health/Medical Informatics, Data Science, Medicine or related field
• 10 years experience in bioinformatics, health/medical informatics, data science or related field as a practitioner
• Previous experience working with hospitals, healthcare institutions, or clinical data owners or health data custodians
• Working knowledge of interoperability standards, application, and trade-offs for health data (e.g. OMOP, HL7, FHIR, etc) and data modalities commonly used in research (e.g. genomics, spatial and single cell transcriptomics, proteomics, cellular imaging etc.)
• Strong understanding of biomedical/healthcare data governance, ethics and privacy considerations
• Experience in data management workflow
• A good knowledge of database design and multiple programming languages
• Ability to drive projects or deals to closure, resourceful in overcoming technical and bureaucratic hurdles, exercising good judgement in escalating where needed
• Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to engage clinicians and non-technical stakeholders and influence research performers
• MS Office proficiency
• PhD or equivalent strongly desired
• PMP certification good to have

The above eligibility criteria are not exhaustive. A*STAR may include additional selection criteria based on its prevailing recruitment policies. These policies may be amended from time to time without notice. We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.