Data Scientist II - Children's Learning Institute

UTHealth Houston • , TX

31d • Remote

About The Position

The Children's Learning Institute (CLI) at UTHealth Houston is seeking a Data Scientist to support our Texas State Initiatives (TSI); a portfolio of large-scale, statewide programs at the intersection of advanced analytics, applied education research, and emerging AI/ML technologies. Our work centers on state-level educational data spanning a range of large-scale statewide systems, including CLI Engage, our instructional delivery and assessment platform, and TECPDS, the Texas Early Childhood Professional Development System, which serves as the statewide workforce registry tracking educator credentials, training, and professional development. Together these systems generate large, heterogeneous datasets linking educator characteristics, instructional practice, and child outcomes across the state of Texas. This work involves close collaboration with State Education Agencies (SEAs), Local Education Agencies (LEAs), and other stakeholders to generate rigorous, policy-relevant insights that directly shape how Texas supports its early childhood workforce and the children they serve. Supported by long-standing state contracts, this position offers the stability of sustained, mission-driven work at the intersection of research and public policy.

The successful candidate will engage in analytically rich and methodologically varied work across a range of research and evaluation questions, including randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies. This includes multilevel and growth modeling, psychometric and IRT analyses, structural equation modeling, latent variable and mixture approaches, and classification methods, among others. The candidate should be prepared to work fluidly across these methods as research and evaluation questions evolve. The datasets involved are large, multi-source, and frequently updated, with nested and longitudinal structures, requiring both statistical sophistication and strong data engineering instincts. Much of this work has direct policy and scientific implications, and findings must be translated into compelling visual products including dashboards, interactive reports, data visualizations, and graphical summaries for state agency partners and program staff, as well as scholarly and technical products.

TSI is an active and growing area of applied AI and machine learning work hosted on AWS. The Data Scientist is expected to meaningfully engage with AI/ML workflows as they relate to analytic and research goals. This includes contributing to predictive modeling and classification for large-scale assessment and workforce data, NLP-based approaches to instructional quality monitoring and document processing, AI-assisted automation of reporting and survey analysis, and generative AI applications supporting educators and program staff. Intellectual curiosity about these methods and a willingness to learn and apply them in service of applied research and operational analytics are essential.

In addition to the core analytic work, the Data Scientist will support both recurring, large-scale reporting (annual, quarterly) and higher-frequency deliverables (e.g., weekly or near-real-time monitoring reports), with the expectation that analytic workflows will be built and maintained to be efficient, reproducible, and responsive to programmatic change. This position will work closely with a faculty manager, who will provide substantive and methodological guidance as needed. Proficiency in SAS is crucial, as many existing data pipelines and analyses are implemented and documented in SAS, and the candidate should be able to understand, maintain, and adapt legacy code including SAS macros. Proficiency in R or Python is also required. Opportunities exist to contribute to a range of scholarly and technical products commensurate with interest and contribution, including peer-reviewed publications, grant applications, technical reports and white papers, methods and software documentation, Shiny applications, and open-source analytic tools hosted on GitHub.

Requirements

• Proficiency with statistical packages, data bases and programming languages for data preparation, storage, transformation, analysis or visualization. Examples include R, SAS, STATA, SPSS, Matlab, SQL, Python, Hadoop, Pig, Hive, MapReduce, Java Tableau, Excel or other big data frameworks.
• Ability to work with a wide variety of data formats/sources such as relational databases, XML, JSON, CSV, text, sensors/activity trackers, clickstreams, social media, and geolocation
• Effective communication skills including written, oral, listening and interpersonal.
• Master’s degree in health care, management, mathematics, engineering, informatics, or a related field
• 3 years of enterprise experience as a data scientist, informaticist, statistician, senior analyst or related role, with demonstrated experience across multiple concurrent projects.
• Employees must permanently reside and work in the State of Texas.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML methods and their application to research and analytic problems preferred.
• Familiarity with cloud-based platforms, particularly AWS, or demonstrated aptitude and willingness to develop that familiarity preferred.

Responsibilities

• Supports faculty, business and research customers with data science services on a variety of projects which may include population health, education research, workforce analytics, program evaluation, applied statistics, personalized medicine and translational research.
• Builds models that incorporate diverse data sets representing administrative, clinical and social health indicators when applicable.
• Apply a variety of methods such as statistical analysis, data mining, predictive analytics, time series analysis, multivariate regression analysis, statistical process control and optimization solutions.
• Perform as a results-oriented problem solver to quickly synthesize complex scenarios, connect abstract patterns/information, apply appropriate methods, and implement practical and timely solutions.
• Demonstrate and embrace a collaborative approach to fully realize the talents of colleagues such as data stewards, IT staff, business analysts, business stakeholders and industry experts.
• Assess the impact of computer networking and data warehousing on data use and analysis when applicable.
• Designs and produces high-quality data visualizations, dashboards, graphical reports, and other visual products that communicate complex findings clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences including state agency partners and policymakers.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level