Healthcare Ontologist; Contingent - Essex Management

Overview

Job Title:

Healthcare Ontologist (Contingent Role) - Essex Management

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

US Remote

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.

The Healthcare Ontologist is a role within the Health Informatics and Standardization (HIS) Department of the Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (BIDS) Division s 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.

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.

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,…