Position: Project Manager Consultancy, Global mHealth Project
Where: San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle
Approximate Hours: 20 hours per week during an 9-month project
Term: Part-time (50%FTE) 9-month consultancy from mid-April to January
Start Date: mid-April
Reports To: Caricia Catalani
The Organization
Founded in 2006 in California’s Silicon Valley with seed funding from Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation, InSTEDD designs and uses open source technology tools to help partners enhance collaboration and improve information flow to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations. InSTEDD has launched two innovation laboratories (aka iLabs) one in Southeast Asia and one in Latin America which are fostering collaborative engineering practices and entrepreneurial innovation in those regions.
InSTEDD has a unique offering — we design and use open source technology tools to help partners enhance collaboration and improve information flow and knowledge sharing to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations. With long-term sustainability in mind, our interdisciplinary team of public health experts, scientists, and software engineers helps build local capacity to solve critical health, safety and development problems. We are committed to evaluating the impact of our programs, documenting best practices, and sharing the results of our work.
Click here to watch our organizational video.
mHealth & Biosurveillance Project
We are seeking a project manager for InSTEDD’s mHealth & biosurveillance project. Around the globe, the number of people with simple mobile phones is growing exponentially. This opens up opportunities to use phones as a tool for local resilience, empowerment, capacity-building, and information sharing. Today, dozens of projects around the world are using mobile digital tools for health, also known as mHealth. These projects often start with equipping community health workers and community leaders with mobile devices that allow them to track patients, provide better health care services, and share health challenges and resources with others. As community health workers collect local information, they are often the first to identify infectious disease cases. If all of this frontline information were gathered and analyzed, we’d be able to detect an epidemic faster than ever before. If this real-time epidemic and disaster monitoring system sent alerts to local, national, and global disaster response teams, help could be sent faster than ever before. This is the hope of
mHealth biosurveillance: better and faster information allows us to respond, to save lives, to prevent outbreaks from exploding, and to build more resilient communities. InSTEDD’s past efforts in this area have taken place in Haiti and Cambodia. Our future efforts are expanding to East/North Africa, India, and the USA around disease issues such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS.
Project Manager Consultancy Role
In coordination with our staff and partners, the Project Manager will play a central role in organizing our efforts, collaborating with key stakeholders and partners, and making sure that our team is meeting its milestones and key deliverables according to our timeline. The project manager will serve as liaison between the InSTEDD technical development and research teams on the one hand, and local NGO partners and our principal funder on the other. We are looking for a flexible and skilled applicant who has experience with project management, particularly in the areas of technology, global development, and public health. More than anything, InSTEDD collaborators need to be resourceful, intelligent, independent, and energetic. Strong communication and writing skills are required. Disaster response, biosurveillance, & epidemiology backgrounds are a plus. Applicants should be willing to travel domestically and, perhaps, internationally, have experience with international partnerships, and have experience working in low-resource settings. A masters in public health, a masters in a related area, or equivalent in terms of project management expertise, is preferred.
The position is a part-time (50%FTE) 9-month consultancy from mid-April to January. Other project management opportunities may be available through InSTEDD.org during and immediately following this consultancy period.
Essential Responsibilities:
- Facilitate project progress. Work in partnership with all team members and partners to make sure that the 9-month project is meeting milestones and deliverable deadlines. This inevitably involves trouble-shooting, clear communication of roles/responsibilities, managing decision-making, and setting and tracking expectations for collaborators;
- Collaborate with scientists to gather information. Work with research and evaluation team to identify promising global mHealth projects, inventory data that projects are collecting, and identify gaps for disease surveillance. In particular, this involves tasks like communicating with mHealth project directors, facilitating key-informant interviews, and (perhaps) making site visits; and,
- Collaborate with communications experts to share knowledge. Work with InSTEDD’s communications team to translate and share relevant project documents and updates to internal and external stakeholders through simple reports, social media updates, data visualizations, and multimedia communications.
Requirements:
- Hard Skills: Strong communication skills, including interpersonal communication as well as writing for reports and proposals. As a plus, applicants may demonstrate skill in producing images, video, and other multimedia.
- Soft skills: Qualified applicants will be resourceful, flexible, and team-oriented with a good sense of humor. The researcher must be a self-starter, able to define and initiate new projects and juggle multiple projects.
- Education: Masters degree in public health, public policy, international affairs, information, related field or the equivalent work experience.
- Location: We prefer that our project manager be located in either the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle for the majority of the 9-months of the project, however exceptional applicants will be given the option of telecommuting with frequent (bi-weekly, for example) travel to InSTEDD offices. Although InSTEDD collaborators often work offsite, from home, and the field, the project manager will benefit from regular in-person meetings with our teammates in Seattle and Bay Area. InSTEDD home offices are located in Sunnyvale, just 30-min commute from San Francisco and 20-min commute from Palo Alto.
- Experience: At least five years of experience in project leadership and management.
- Travel: An eagerness to work globally and partner with organizational leaders, policymakers, funders, and communities of users worldwide. Willingness to travel nationally and internationally for 1-2 week stays.
Consultancy rate
- Range of $40-55/hour (depending on experience) for 20 hours per week during an 9-month project.
Contact/Applicant Details
- Interested applicants should send their CV/resume, cover letter, and a 2-3 page writing sample (for example, a section of a proposal, article, blog, or scientific manuscript that the applicant composed/first-authored) to caricia@instedd.org. Deadline for applications is April 18. Applicants will be informed of hiring decisions by April 27. The position commences as soon as possible (by April 30 at the latest), so early applications are encouraged.