Intern/Work-Study
Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator
Global.health Intern
Start Date: January 4, 2027
Expected end date: May 31, 2027
Internship description:
About the Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator
Through the creation of the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator, Boston Children’s reinforces a commitment to, and investment in pediatric innovation. We are combining our data, clinical expertise, and healthcare technology development experience, with leading worldwide industry partners – including start-ups – to transform health care. We work to surface, support and accelerate Boston Children’s innovations for the purpose of improving pediatric care Until Every Child is Well.
HealthMap
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available website integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from online news sources, social media, clinical datasets, big data, wearable devices to validated official alerts retrieved from the World Health Organization. Data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases.
Duties & Responsibilities:
The Global.health Curation Team works closely with project managers, who set the scope, scale, and timeline of outbreak response
Curators compile epidemiological outbreak data from openly accessible sources to create a standardized line-list dataset; curators may also integrate other data types, including, animal outbreak data, genomic data, wastewater data, climate data, and response.
Curators contribute to a sourcing strategy to find trusted media sources and identify, vet, and log relevant outbreak information
Curators contribute to project status updates with G.h partner organizations and our community through newsletters and other written and oral communications
Project details:
The mission of Global.health (G.h) is to enable the rapid sharing of trusted and open public health data to advance the response to infectious diseases around the world.
Our niche within the global public health landscape is the curation of infectious disease outbreak data during the first 100 days of an outbreak. Our line-lists contain key epidemiological information, at an individual case level, including details for age, gender, location, symptoms, transmission, treatment, and more. The early days of an outbreak are often devoid of reliable, easily accessible data of this kind. The curation arm of the G.h attempts to fill this gap.
Relevant Experience & Qualifications
Currently enrolled in a graduate program in epidemiology, statistics, public health or related field at a college/university
Familiarity with epidemiology, data entry, and analysis
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Receptive to feedback, assumes accountability for mistakes and sees this as a learning opportunity
Must be self-motivated, can work well independently and in a team environment with cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams
Dependable and reliable team member that is comfortable working in a remote/ hybrid setting
Technical proficiency in MS Office required; Familiarity with Google Drive, Slack, Github preferred
Additional
Intern will receive guidance and 1:1 support
Ability to meet requirements for practicums, and school/internship credits
Location: Hybrid, with the expectation that interns and their managers attend most onsite Tuesdays. Interns must be located in approved New England states: MA, RI, CT, ME or NH.
Start and end dates are flexible