Database Assistant

• Full time (1 FTE) casual opportunity
• Fixed term contract (3 months)
• Flexible working arrangements available
• Respected global research organisation

The George Institute (‘TGI’) is 700+ people around the world, all focused on improving the health of millions of people worldwide. As a medical research institute affiliated with leading universities, and with projects in approximately 50 countries, we are challenging the status quo in healthcare to:

• Find better treatments for the world’s biggest health problems
• Transform primary health care to support better health for more people
• Harness the power of communities, governments and markets to improve health

Our innovative commercial enterprises help maximise our impact.

Diets high in energy, saturated fat, added sugars and salt are contributing to increasing incidences of non-communicable diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancers. The George Institute’s Food Policy team works to address this issue by undertaking research and advocacy in relation to the food supply including monitoring the composition of foods. As part of this it established a branded food composition database to monitor the sodium content of foods which has since been broadened to monitor other nutrients. In 2012 a smartphone application using this database was developed and launched in Australia. The aim of FoodSwitch is to continually capture product data and in return provide consumers with access to easy-to-understand nutritional information about packaged and processed foods.

An exciting, casual opportunity exists for a Database Assistant to join our growing organisation.

The Database Assistant will be required to assist the food database team in ensuring data integrity and accuracy in the Institute’s Food Composition Database. The role involves data cleaning, data quality checking and data maintenance. The Database Assistant will predominantly perform quality checks on nutrition data, categorise food products and assign brands and manufacturers to food products and assist the food database team with data related projects.

Duties and Key Responsibilities:

• Assist database team with datasets including quality checking and formatting
• Liaise with the database team for final check of data for data projects
• Deep data cleaning at the leaf category level
• Categorisation of food products
• Assigning brands and manufactures to food products
• Quality checks of data projects before they are released

Skills, Knowledge and Experience:

Essential

• Bachelor of food science and nutrition or health related field
• Solid understanding of food composition, nutrition and science with associated qualifications
• Very high attention to detail is essential
• Well-developed computer skills, in particular Excel
• Able to plan and organise own workload
• Agility to handle multiple tasks with a limited time frame

Desirable

• Experience working with food databases
• Familiar with local, national and global food products

The closing date for applications is 09.04.2021.

We are reviewing applications as soon as we receive them, so please apply now! However, please note, we reserve the right to close this vacancy early if suitable candidates are found.