Healthcare Ontologist (Contingent Role) - Essex Management

Job Title: Healthcare Ontologist (Contingent Role) - Essex Management

Notice to Candidates

Employment in this position is expressly contingent upon Essex Management's receipt of a contract award from the Federal Government.

Location

US Remote

About Essex

This position supports "Essex, an Emmes Company". Essex is a biomedical informatics and health information technology-focused consultancy founded in 2009 and headquartered in Rockville, MD. The Essex team comprises experts with extensive experience in strategically developing and managing complex health and biomedical information programs for clients in the Federal Government, research academia, and private sectors.

Primary Purpose

The Healthcare Ontologist is a role within the Health Informatics and Standardization (HIS) Department of the Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (BIDS) Division at Essex. This role brings working expertise in health informatics, clinical data standards, interoperability, ontology, or applied data science to the delivery of technically sound work across federal biomedical research and health IT programs. The Healthcare Ontologist operates with greater autonomy than junior staff, owns well-defined tasks and small projects with minimal supervision, and contributes substantively to team problem-solving and scientific quality. Essex supports NCI and NIH programs requiring deep standards expertise and clinical credibility, and the Healthcare Ontologist is expected to bring sound technical judgment and domain knowledge to the work.

Core Functions

• Own and execute well-defined analytical and technical tasks and small projects with minimal supervision from senior staff or your manager.
• Assist junior staff with task-related questions, troubleshooting, and orientation.
• Contribute substantively to team discussions on methodology, standards, tools, and technical decisions.
• Apply working familiarity with best practices in your domain to deliver technically sound, high-quality work products.
• Gather, elicit, and document functional requirements and specifications from varied stakeholders involved in health informatics projects.
• Support data conversion, mapping, and validation activities relevant to implementation of clinical and health IT systems.
• Support peer review of deliverables and contribute to quality assurance activities.
• Contribute to team documentation, SOPs, and knowledge base materials.
• Shadow senior staff during candidate interviews to begin developing evaluation skills.
• Perform other related duties as assigned.

Functions Specific to Role

• Develop, curate, and maintain biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabulary resources; apply frameworks such as OWL, RDF, and SKOS to knowledge representation tasks.
• Map clinical and research concepts to established terminologies including NCIt, SNOMED CT, LOINC, MeSH, RxNorm, and HPO; ensure semantic consistency and coverage across data domains.
• Support the development and governance of Common Data Elements (CDEs) and data dictionaries by providing ontology and terminology expertise; contribute to caDSR curation and maintenance.
• Advise program teams on terminology binding, concept mapping, and semantic interoperability requirements for clinical research and health IT systems.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Bioinformatics teams to ensure that ontology and terminology resources are integrated correctly into data pipelines, annotation workflows, and research infrastructure.
• Contribute to the governance of terminology standards; engage with NCI, OBO Foundry, HL7 terminology working groups, or comparable communities as appropriate.
• Design and deliver training and guidance to program staff on the correct application of controlled vocabularies and ontology-based annotation.

Required skills

Core Skills

• Working proficiency in the core technical tools, data standards, and analytical approaches relevant to the assigned program and department.
• Ability to work independently and within a team in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
• Strong written and oral communication skills, including the ability to document work clearly and present findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office applications.

Skills Specific to Role

• Working knowledge of major biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies: NCIt, SNOMED CT, LOINC, MeSH, RxNorm, HPO, GO, or equivalent.
• Experience with ontology development and curation using tools such as Protégé, OBO-Edit, or comparable platforms.
• Familiarity with semantic web technologies (OWL, RDF, SPARQL) and their application to biomedical knowledge representation.
• Experience with NCI data infrastructure including caDSR, NCIt, and associated APIs preferred.
• Ability to perform systematic concept mapping and cross-terminology alignment; experience with terminology server platforms (e.g., BioPortal, VSAC, NCI EVS) preferred.

Core Experience

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in health informatics, biomedical informatics, clinical research, public health, biology, computer science, data science, or a related field.
• 5+ years of relevant professional or research experience.

Experience Specific to Role

• Demonstrated experience developing or curating biomedical ontologies or controlled vocabulary resources in a research or federal health IT context.
• Experience contributing to NCI caDSR, NCIt, OBO Foundry, or HL7 terminology working groups preferred.
• Familiarity with FAIR data principles and their application to ontology governance and data sharing preferred.

Emmes Group: Building a Better Future for Us All

Emmes Group is transforming the future of clinical research, bringing the promise of new medical discovery closer within reach for patients. Emmes Group was founded as Emmes more than 47 years ago, becoming one of the primary clinical research providers to the U.S. Government before expanding into public-private partnerships and commercial biopharma. Emmes has built industry-leading capabilities in cell and gene therapy, vaccines and infectious diseases, ophthalmology, rare diseases, and neuroscience.

We believe the work we do has a direct impact on patients' lives and act accordingly. We strive to build a collaborative culture at the intersection of being both performance-driven and people-driven. We're looking for talented professionals eager to help advance clinical research as we work to embed innovation into the fabric of our company. If you share our passion for research, come join us.

Why work at Emmes?

At Emmes, your actions and hard work will have a direct impact on public health initiatives, both globally and in our local communities with opportunities for volunteerism through our  Emmes Cares  community engagement program.   We offer a competitive benefits package focused on the health and needs of our growing workforce, including:

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The Emmes Company, LLC is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate in its selection and employment practices. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability or protected veteran status.

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