Shifting the Paradigm of Heart Failure Research with Advanced Analytics

Institute or Center: National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI)

Project: Shifting the Paradigm of Heart Failure Research with Advanced Analytics

Skills sought:

  • Excellent leadership and communication skills
  • Demonstrated ability to work with numerous collaborators in complex initiatives
  • Data science and/or analytics background with experience in data management, data quality, and processes
  • Experience with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) using health research data
  • Experience working with human research data, knowledge of data standards, and best practices

About the position: NHLBI seeks a senior data strategist to help launch HeartShare, a paradigm-shifting heart failure research program. This program is unique in its public-private partnership model and will combine public and private datasets on heart failure patients to support sophisticated analyses. The Scholar will have a vantage point into the nation’s public biomedical research enterprise and a unique opportunity to conduct complex, multimodal science with the potential to advance heart failure diagnosis and care.  

This is an excellent opportunity to collaborate with NHLBI leadership, staff, and extramural investigators in a complex data science initiative that will leverage new technologies to advance the care of heart failure patients. The Scholar will also work with NHLBI’s BioData CATALYST platform.

About the work: Leveraging advanced analytics approaches for large volumes of patient research data has the potential to transform and personalize the treatment of heart failure patients. The Scholar will:

  • Help initiate and strategize the curation of data (e.g., clinical, images, biospecimens, omics) from observational cohorts and trials from publicly and privately funded sources.
  • Serve as the liaison between NHLBI’s existing and developing IT resources, program leadership, and extramural investigators.
  • Oversee the creation of a data interface for heart failure data within BioData CATALYST to allow other investigators to access and interact with project data.
  • Define and drive analytic processes to achieve program goals by assessing the current state of data and analytic capabilities; create a strategy for data analytics.
  • Identify necessary tools to enable deep learning algorithms for images and omics data, supervising completion of analytic milestones and assessing user needs.
  • Help plan a future phase of the heart failure program in which electronic health records and data from wearable health devices will be incorporated by creating curation processes and standards for these data types.

Datasets involved:

  • Existing human research data – demographic, clinical, laboratory, imaging, biomarker, and multi-omics data – from heart failure patients
  • Comparable data from industry-supported clinical trials will also be pooled for analysis

Why this project matters: The approach to heart failure treatment has been limited by a “one-size-fits-all” paradigm. Pooling and analyzing large amounts of phenotypic and multi-omics data from heart failure patients can enable the  discovery of subsets of patients within the disease and the biologic mechanisms underlying each subset. This has the potential to facilitate the discovery and development of new treatments for specific patients and changes the paradigm to one of personalized care for heart failure patients.

Work Location: Bethesda, MD. Remote work will be considered.

Work environment: NHLBI is the third largest institute at NIH and at the forefront of biomedical research in many exciting areas that intersect with data science. The division hosting this project is team-oriented, led by an internationally known cardiovascular researcher and epidemiologist, and includes other nationally known scientific leaders. The Scholar will work closely with NHLBI’s BioData CATALYST leadership as well as with HeartShare physicians, researchers, and staff from NHLBI. The Scholar will interact with investigators from other academic medical centers and may also work with investigators from industry. 

To apply to this or other DATA Scholar positions, please see instructions here: datascience.nih.gov/data-scholars-2021.

This page last reviewed on March 23, 2023