[Cs-jobs] The Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program

[Lindsey Clarkson]

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of
complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event
of success.

-- Ernest Shackleton, 1913

The Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program (www.bcdsp.net), a
small research organization affiliated with Boston University
<http://www.bu.edu/>  is seeking an energetic "jack of all trades"
programmer to assist researchers with database organization and queries.
Your challenge is to make it easier to select data subsets from our
patient information database, which contains about 15 years of data on
roughly 25 million patients. The data are currently stored
hierarchically in flat files and accessed by custom Pascal (Delphi)
programs; new versions of the database are produced annually. Extracted
data is presented to researchers as flat ASCII files, suitable for
analysis by SAS, Stata and similar tools. This primary database is
augmented by drug and diagnosis dictionaries and several derived
datasets. Limited, read-only access to the data is provided by simple
internal web applications.

You will learn the current scheme and then help plan for its future
replacement. Excellent communication skills are essential as you will be
the interface between the data and crack researchers who know the data
well but are not programmers. Interest and eventual understanding of the
research area and questions is essential. Ideally you will know, or be
eager to learn, C/C++, SQL, SAS, Delphi Pascal, a scripting language
(such as Python or Ruby), HTML and related web tools. Prior experience
with hierarchical data (and its relational equivalents) very desirable.
An interest in public health issues would make this a particularly
rewarding experience. Our small, tight-knit team occupies comfortable,
casual offices in Lexington center, easily accessible by car, bicycle
trail or bus. 

This is an opportunity to grow your skills, and have a real impact on
the public health of the world.

 

Contact dsmacl at rcn.com

 
Lindsey Clarkson 
Financial Administrator
Boston University 
Department of Computer Science 
111 Cummington Street
Boston, MA 02215
P: 617-353-8919
F: 617-353-6457
lclarkso at cs.bu.edu
www.cs.bu.edu <http://www.cs.bu.edu/>  
 
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