Senior Informaticist – Health Informatics; Ontologist

US Remote

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.

Position summary

The Senior Informaticist – Health Informatics (Ontologist) is a role within the Health Informatics and Standards (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 Senior Informaticist – Health Informatics (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 NIH programs, including those within the NCI and NIAID, requiring deep standards expertise and clinical credibility, and the Senior Informaticist – Health Informatics (Ontologist) is expected to bring sound technical judgment and domain knowledge to the work.

Core Functions

• Lead and own complex analytical and technical projects with minimal direction; determine approach and execute based on expertise and scientific judgment.
• Mentor and coach Associate and mid-level Informaticists through scientific and technical challenges.
• Serve as backup for the Manager when unavailable; step up to facilitate team meetings or coordinate project activities as needed.
• Apply advanced domain knowledge to design sound solutions, troubleshoot complex problems, and contribute to standards, workflow, and architectural decisions.
• Advise project teams on adoption of data architectures, standards, and data models; assess stakeholder needs and advise on solutions based on requirements.
• Contribute to the team knowledge base: document processes, write technical notes, and participate in knowledge-sharing activities.
• Contribute to at least one Innovation Lab or comparable internal initiative.
• Engage directly with clients, scientific collaborators, and standards body contacts on technical topics; represent BIDS competently in external discussions.
• Participate in interviews of external candidates and provide written evaluations to the hiring manager.
• Contribute technical content to business proposals and capability statements when asked.
• 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…