Data Science Specialist - Climate Services and Agronomy

The organization

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT delivers researchbased solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people s lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition climate change biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

The Alliance works with local national and multinational partners across Latin America and the Caribbean Asia and Africa and with the public and private sectors. The Alliance is part of CGIAR a global research partnership for a foodsecure future dedicated to reducing poverty enhancing food and nutrition security and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.

About the position

The Climate Action research area of the Alliance BioversityCIAT requires a Data Science Specialist with background experience and interest in using various modeling techniques to improve decision making for the agricultural sector in response to climate adaptation challenges. This position will design and implement decision support tools (DSTs) for improved agronomic management and climate adaptation for a variety of projects across the world. The successful candidate will leverage Alliance expertise in modeling and data science and use their own expertise to design new and improve existing DSTs to deliver climateinformed agronomic advisories at scale. The candidate will have a deep understanding of statistical models and crop models including (but not limited to) processbased crop models their development calibration and spatialization for agronomic adaptation applications. Further to this a deep understanding of agronomy crop physiology and soilplantatmosphere interactions is essential for this position since one of the tasks will be to tailor/translate crop modeling outputs into actionable climateinformed advisories for farmers. We seek somebody with a solutionoriented mindset and a collaborative spirit. The incumbent will work in a team of data scientists and modelers in Kenya and in collaboration with scientists in other countries to understand users needs; and design develop and deploy DSTs and coordinate activities and carry out capacity building activities with partners. The computational agronomist will leverage (and help build) expertise across the Alliance coordinating with Alliance scientists from Asia and Latin America on related thematic areas.

The position will contribute to the development of tools and capacity development under the iSPARK (innovation in sustainability policy adaptation and resilience in Kenya) project and especially around the continued development maintenance and scaling of digital tools that support the generation and delivery of sitespecific recommendations for improved farmer decision making. The candidate will also be working as part of a variety of projects around agronomic advisory including the Accelerating the Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research in Africa (AICCRA) helping build pathways for scaling climateinformed agronomic advisories.

Key Responsibilities:

• Apply stateoftheart data science methods to extract insights from field observations and geospatial data to provide climate smart and tailored agronomic recommendations at scale.
  
• Take the lead on specific activities to modularize white label data analysis framework applying but not limited to processbased and empirical models to conduct research on yield prediction improved technology targeting and impact modelling.
  
• Support the connection of weather and climate forecasts into an agronomic recommendations engine / decision support system.
  
• Contribute to conceptualization and development of robust yet practical decision support tools (DST) for the deployment of climate services and agronomic advisories within partners existing extension platforms.
  
• Collaborate effectively with EiA TRANSFORM Work Package members providing guidance and building capacity around crop modeling and its applications for generating agronomic gain.
  
• Contribute to building and nurturing key partnerships in Africa working closely with NARs Agricultural Services Digital Partners Farmer Organizations and other CGIAR centers.
  
• Coordinate activities internally at the Alliance and CGIAR and stay up to date on activities of key partners as well as on new methods and approaches to crop modeling and climate services.
  
• Contribute to and lead reporting and scientific paper writing.
  
• Participate in grant proposal writing and project management to secure funding for research projects deemed necessary and relevant.