Reports to: Program Manager

Viral pandemics are one of the greatest risks to humanity. Despite taking giant leaps in technology and science, we are more vulnerable today than we were 100 years ago. From Ebola to COVID-19, pandemics have underscored the need for a systematic way of detecting and tracking outbreaks of many common and fatal infectious diseases. The necessary diagnostic tests either do not exist or are not available where the need is greatest — in the communities of lower-income countries, particularly those in West and Central Africa, which suffer continuously from a lack of diagnostic capacity. As a result, millions of infectious disease cases remain unidentified and uncontained, and outbreaks are only detected once so many people have become ill that the problem cannot be ignored — typically much too late to stop an epidemic.

To address this gap, our team is building and deploying Sentinel: a pandemic preemption system that detects viral threats in real-time and by way of checkups in rural clinics, allowing us to stop infectious diseases before they spread. This initiative has the potential to transform the world’s ability to detect viruses that cause outbreaks, radically improve the speed at which health authorities can respond, and significantly expand the geographic area covered by outbreak surveillance. This concept was first articulated through and largely funded by the Audacious Project, a collaborative approach to funding big ideas with the potential to create change at a thrilling scale.

In addition to the Sentinel, the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) conducts a myriad of clinical and laboratory research studies at each of our project sites, including several studies on the characterization of acute febrile illness and respiratory illness, the incidence of viral haemorrhagic fevers including Lassa, and surveillance of zoonotic diseases. Some of these studies involve the enrolment and active follow-up of research participants.

Job Description:

The Site Project Coordinator will be responsible for providing support, managerial oversight and coordination of the projects and ensure its smooth day-to-day operation. This individual will provide regular updates of the operations, logistics and laboratory activities ongoing at the site. The Site Project Coordinator will track the project milestones and manage the relationship between the project team, the study leadership, and the hospital management. The Site Project Coordinator will relate cordially with the study PIs and ensure all potential risks and timelines.