John Robinson's Blog, page 7

Job Opportunity: Chief Technology Office | Innovation and Engineering Services, Web Platform

Location: Albany – 50 Wolf Rd., Flr 3 or NYC area

The incumbent for this position will be part of a group within the WebNY Platform team that helps to ensure all websites developed and delivered are functionally accessible to all users regardless of ability.

The duties of the position include but are not limited to:

Test websites for accessibility issuesProvide guidance and support to developers to develop websites, or components of websites, that adhere to accessibility complianceProvide guidance and support to content editors to generate content that adhere to accessibility complianceEvaluate and respond to accessibility issues as reported by testing tools or vendors

Tasks will include:

Use accessibility testing and/or monitoring tools to assess website complianceCreate accessibility reports to share updates on our progressResearch resources to aide developers in their remediation effortsCreate user stories to document accessibility issues and provide all elements needed by developers for remediationIdentify and post accessibility resources for our various audiences (client agencies, QA team, development team, design team, etc.)Provide verbal and prepare written communication to other team members and possibly to clients, and attend meetings as neededCreate presentation materials as needed to report on status of accessibility issues; Support any tasks related to training and audit functions as needed

Daily task will require the use of the following MS Office applications:

WordPowerPointExcelOutlookTeamsSharePoint

Apply: StateJobsNY – Public Information: Review Vacancy 

Job Opportunity:Executive Director | Hudson Crossing Park

Hudson Crossing Park Executive Director Job Description

Hudson Crossing Park is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation with a mission to tie environmental responsibility to economic revitalization, and to engage people of all ages in making informed choices for a sustainable future. Centered on Champlain Canal Lock C5 Island just north of the Village of Schuylerville, New York, Hudson Crossing Park is non-sectarian and does not discriminate against persons of any race, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national or ethnic origin, or those with disabilities, respecting the dignity and worth of all individuals.

Responsibilities

Leadership

Together with the Board of Directors develop and execute short- and long-term strategies, including a multi-year strategic plan, to accomplish Hudson Crossing Park’s mission.Represent the organization externally and identify opportunities to grow and expand Hudson Crossing Park’s impact by collaborating with existing and new strategic partners.Implement, manage, and continue to grow the organization’s core programs, with particular emphasis on educational programming and events for all ages throughout the year.Keep abreast of developments in related areas of importance to the Park’s mission and share relevant information with the appropriate parties, including the Hudson Crossing Park Board and community partners.

Fundraising

Cultivate and oversee an effective fundraising strategy and team to maintain and grow the organization’s facilities, programs, and staffing.Inspire and expand the organization’s donor base and strategic funding partnerships.Write and administer grants.

Partnerships and Strategic Alliances

Maintain and expand effective partnerships with municipal, state, and federal agencies, as well as community, canal, and conservation organizations.Work with the Board to identify, build, and maintain personal relationships with donors, grantors, partners, and community stakeholders.

Communications and Events

Oversee the dissemination of Hudson Crossing Park’s mission, values, achievements, and goals through various forms of media to increase local and regional awareness about the organization.Manage the conception and execution of cultural events and programs to highlight Hudson Crossing Park’s mission and facilities as well as local resources to a diverse community.Work with the Board of Directors to develop strategies and initiatives to expand the Park’s current scope

Management and Operations

Prepare the annual operating budget and direct and monitor the expenditure of funds while working with the Board of Directors to ensure compliance with budget, consistency, and conformance with established goals and objectives.Engage and support the Board of Directors and advisory committees in fulfillment of their responsibilities, guidance, and oversight.Hire, supervise, and train staff and contract employees as necessary while nurturing a collaborative work environment.Recruit, train, and provide support to volunteers of all ages and abilities in carrying out plans authorized by the board, including ongoing and signature programs, facilities maintenance, events, and other related tasks as necessary.Direct the day-to-day operation of the park, its programs, events, and volunteers while ensuring that existing park facilities are properly and safely maintained.Make regular reports to the Hudson Crossing Park Board.Perform other related duties as necessary.

Minimum Qualifications

Demonstrate strong personal interest in, knowledge of, and passion for the protection of the environment, local and regional history, and community outreach and revitalization.Minimum 3-5 years’ management experience, with a preference for experience working in a small non-profit organization.Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to communicate effectively in public and small professional settings, as well as with a range of diverse stakeholders.Demonstrated ability to develop and maintain collaborative and productive relationships with a broad group of constituents including volunteers, community groups, boards, officials, donors, and the public.Demonstrated success in setting goals and executing objectives, with the ability to prioritize, delegate responsibilities, and work collaboratively in a team setting.Demonstrated success or ability to secure funding through grants and donations.Ability to understand, manage, and plan the financial aspects of a small non-profit organization.Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university

Preferred Qualifications

Advanced degree from an accredited college or universityKnowledge and experience with environmental conservation, education, and community outreach activitiesExperience with managing and submitting grant applicationsExperience working closely with a Board of Directors

Compensation

Salary range $50,000 – $65,000 commensurate with experience and qualifications.

Location
Office in Schuylerville, New York

To Apply
Please submit resume to: info@HudsonCrossingPark.org, attn: Search Committee.
Applications will be accepted through January 15, 2024 or until position has been filled.

Jobs Ability October 2023 Statistics

We match people to jobs with AI

Jobs Ability is a generative AI-driven system that matches people with disabilities
skills to jobs and assists businesses in recruiting as well as using a combination
of technology and dedicated team to provide feedback on the accessibility of
your digital collateral.

October 2023 Statistics*

3,500+
JOBS ABILITY COMPLETED PROFILES

70,610
JOB POSTINGS

147**
OURABILITY.JOBS APPLY CLICKS

11,318
JOBSABILITY.COM EVENTS

69+
EMPLOYERS

11,000
OURABILITY.JOBS VISITORS

*source google analytics
** record number

Jobs Ability September 2023 Statistics

We match people to jobs with AI

Jobs Ability is a generative AI-driven system that matches people with disabilities
skills to jobs and assists businesses in recruiting as well as using a combination
of technology and dedicated team to provide feedback on the accessibility of
your digital collateral.

September 2023 Statistics*

3,500+
JOBS ABILITY COMPLETED PROFILES

70,526
JOB POSTINGS

49
OURABILITY.JOBS APPLY CLICKS

11,791**
JOBSABILITY.COM VISITORS

69+
EMPLOYERS

9,800**
OURABILITY.JOBS VISITORS

*source google analytics
** record number

Jobs Ability August 2023 Statistics

We match people to jobs with AI

Jobs Ability is a generative AI-driven system that matches people with disabilities
skills to jobs and assists businesses in recruiting as well as using a combination
of technology and dedicated team to provide feedback on the accessibility of
your digital collateral.

August 2023 Statistics*

3,500+
JOBS ABILITY COMPLETED PROFILES

56,958
JOB POSTINGS

64
OURABILITY.JOBS APPLY CLICKS

15,000**
JOBSABILITY.COM VISITORS

69+
EMPLOYERS

12,000**
OURABILITY.JOBS VISITORS

*source google analytics
** record number

Job Opportunity | Voluntary Protection Products Administrative Support

Function: Voluntary Protection Products Servicing
Updated As Of: August 2023
Workgroup: VPP Support Group (VPPSG)
Direct Reports: No
Team: VPP
Travel: No
Reports To: Supervisor – VPPSG
Overtime Eligibility: Yes

Workgroup Summary: The Voluntary Protection Products Servicing department is responsible for the administration of all TMIS Voluntary Protection Products. This includes, but is not limited to, adjudicating claims, processing cancellation requests, correcting dealer application entries, reviewing the accuracy of automated refund/claims payments, fielding inquiries from customer, dealers and lienholders.

Team Summary: The VPPSG team supports the efforts of the Toyota/Lexus TMIS workgroup. The VPPSG completes administrative support activities such as processing of cancellation requests, fulfillment of accounting related needs, reconciliation work, correspondence processing.

Job Summary: Responsible for completing administrative tasks as needed for the VPP Servicing department. The job is fully remote and does not include in-office team (other than picking up equipment on the first day of the job).

Responsibilities:

Process applications/cancellationsProcess returned mail/address changesIndex documentsTrack DSA follow up items for completionClear application entry errors from Error ReportsOther miscellaneous processing as needed

What Success in This Position Looks Like:

Exceptional attention to detailAbility to produce both quality and speed when working through a processing taskAble to navigate multiple computer systems to complete a single taskWorking knowledge of Microsoft Office Applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel Outlook, etc.).Able to meet expectations in a work from home environmentAble to work an assigned shift between the hours of 7am-7pm M-F

This job description will be reviewed periodically and is subject to change by management.

Please send resumes to info@ourability.com

Jobs Ability June 2023 Statistics

WE MATCH SKILLS TO JOBS

May 2023 Statistics

12,101*
JOBSABILITY.COM VISITORS

3,258
JOBS ABILITY COMPLETED PROFILES

68+
EMPLOYERS

74,239
JOB POSTINGS

11,633*
OURABILITY.JOBS VISITORS

75
OURABILITY.JOBS APPLY CLICKS

Team Member Highlights

Last month we introduced you to Kartik Sawhney, Our Ability’s Senior Manager for Technology and Product. This month we invite you to read Kartik’ s most recent blog post:

Planting the Seeds of Activism: Kartik Sawhney Part I – Shortly after being born, Kartik Sawhney was diagnosed with an eye disease known as Retinopathy of Prematurity, or ROP, a disease that generates abnormal blood vessels in the retina of some premature babies. Read More

Becoming an Entrepreneur and Innovator: Kartik Sawhney Part II – From day one at Stanford, Sawhney did not want for the tools and assistive technologies that he fought so hard for in India. Read More

Stay up to date with news, announcements and featured jobs by visiting Our Ability.

Jobs Ability is an international Premier Artificial Intelligence-driven system that matches people with disabilities’ skills to job.

*Record number of visitors

Robinson: Emerging Technology a Game Changer in Disability Employment Space

By Dave Allen

When John Robinson founded Our Ability in 2011, he envisioned the company as a mentoring network for people with disabilities. Using the HuffPost as a roadmap, Our Ability would produce and share video stories about individuals with disabilities, creating a network of videos to inspire and empower the disabled to be more successful in life. But as Robinson traveled around the country speaking to various corporations, he discovered that many of the individuals with disabilities he met shared one particular frustration—they all had a hard time finding a job. Robinson, in fact, applied for hundreds of jobs before he landed his first full-time position.

“That’s when I realized there was an opportunity here to create something that could help the next generation in a way where I didn’t have that help,” Robinson says. “The video stories were great, but that’s not ultimately what people wanted. The younger people who were watching the stories would email us and say, ‘Hey, this is great, can we send you our resume?’ And the companies we spoke to wanted to know if they could post jobs on our website. Very quickly, the site became transactional in that the people wanted to upload their resumes and companies wanted to post jobs.”

So, Our Ability pivoted as a company, creating a job board for people with disabilities and dedicating itself to helping match these individuals with jobs. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities in May 2023 was 8.3 percent in individuals ages 16 to 64, according to the U.S Department of Labor. That’s down nearly half from 15 percent in 2011.

Emerging technologies, such as generative AI, or artificial intelligence, are a big reason behind the decrease in the unemployment rate for people with disabilities. They’re making it much easier for individuals with disabilities to not only connect with employers, but also find job opportunities that match their lifetime goals. In the following Q&A, Robinson talks about the growth of Our Ability’s job placement platform, Jobs Ability, and the role emerging technology will have in placing people with disabilities in the future.

Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in terms of finding a job after graduating from college?

A: The greatest challenge was getting someone to believe I could do the work, to understand that I actually had the skills to do that job. I remember having two major interviews—one with a major TV network in New York City in the research department analyzing ratings [to support the sales staff], and a similar one in Toronto with a major broadcast company. I had the ability to do the job. I could analyze ratings. That’s what I studied at Syracuse and that’s what I did in my internship with WSBK-TV 38 in Boston. I felt great about my interviews because I knew the material. It’s like acing a test: You know when you do well. I knew ratings and shares and how they had ramifications in sales inside and out because the person I interned with in Boston was the best in New England. I had great references, too. But they didn’t hire me. That’s a big part of our existing jobs’ system. People have the skills to do it, but how do you show that? In 1990 they weren’t going to hire me on a trial basis to see if I could do what I said I could do. But with our system, we can assess skills in a better way then we could back then.

Q: Was there more discrimination back then toward hiring people with disabilities, or was it that you just didn’t have the means/accessibility to the jobs you wanted?

A: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed in July of 1990, a couple months after I graduated from Syracuse, so while there was some discrimination, I’d say there was less understanding of having someone with a disability come to work. I had access to jobs just as any Syracuse grad had, through the Newhouse School’s job board, newspapers, etc., and there was a network of people through Syracuse at many of the TV stations I interviewed with, but the television world wasn’t ready for someone with a disability to come work at NBC or CBS. And so that experience really forged what we’re doing now.

Discrimination doesn’t go away, but it’s definitely a lot easier now because companies want to hire good people, and people with disabilities now have an easier time putting their information out there. What we can do, though, is rapidly speed that up in a way that we couldn’t do before, and that’s really, really important. So, if I were looking at a tear sheet of six jobs that Newhouse was sending us as graduates in 1990-’91, I can send that post out to 60,000 people now. That’s what the system is designed to do and we’re in a much better place now as far as inclusion is concerned then we were in 1990.

Q: When did you actually start posting jobs on Our Ability’s website?

A: In 2013, we started working with CVS Health and some smaller companies in New York State who were wanting to post jobs, and we got more and more emails from people needing help getting jobs and more companies wanting to post jobs. We thought we were cutting edge just posting jobs for people with disabilities, and we continued to do that for the next several years. But I realized that the resumes we were getting were not triggering interviews with our corporate partners. Even though the skills matched, the interviews didn’t happen. So, I started looking at machine learning (i.e., artificial intelligence, or AI) and ways to improve the outcomes for job applicants.

Q: When did you first start to think that AI might be the solution to improve these outcomes?

A: It started when we were in discussions with Microsoft in 2018, because we knew their system could do that. They had the algorithm. They could do text analytics. You could have a conversation and it would pull out text. Once I knew we could do that it was like, ‘Ok, we can read a lot of resumes and job descriptions really rapidly.’

What happened next was really a perfect storm. First, we had a meeting with Syracuse University, which offered us support for our new job platform through a program called iConsult, whereby graduate students work on specific projects with real ramifications. It would be our project, we would keep the intellectual property, but we could use these students to do the coding work we needed. We had to do a better job at assessing the resumes of candidates that were coming to us. At the same time, we had a meeting with IBM Watson. IBM wanted us to use Watson to run the AI engine. This was in the early stages of AI, so we started thinking about what we could do different. Syracuse asked us if we were married to IBM, which we weren’t because Microsoft had a large grant program—the Microsoft AI for Good Program. I had connections at Microsoft, Syracuse had connections there, and so we got the first big grant to look at employment in the disability space.

That all came together in 2019, a few months before COVID hit. That stopped the speeches, any videos that we were doing, and forced us to just build this system. What COVID did is it really focused us. It focused me as a leader, it focused us in the day-to-day work that we were doing, and it focused us in trying us to sell more companies on what we could do. The other thing it did was focus the world around us in emerging technology. We’re all communicating differently today. We’re working remotely and having more virtual meetings. It focused technology companies other than us to do the same, and invest in Open AI because of the rapidly changing environment. Just in the last six months, the advancements in generative AI make it 10 times faster than it was in 2019. We’re at the cutting edge of what we can do to help individuals with disabilities in a really rapid way.

Q: For people with disabilities, what are the advantages to using AI versus your standard web-based job-search platforms?

A: I won’t get into too much proprietary information, but we understand that ability can match real-life situations in a way that is unique. [Junior: Help me out here. This part in red doesn’t make any sense to me. What do you mean by real-life situations? Are you talking about real-life experience? Be more specific.] We look less at traditional methods, like Indeed or LinkedIn does, and we lean more into what ability someone has to do the job. That’s our differentiator. And because it’s built by people with disabilities for people with disabilities, we understand our community better than any traditional, web-based job platform.

Q: You describe your AI-driven system as a “virtual job path,” or as a “pathway to employment.” What do you mean? Is it important for people with disabilities to see the job search as a pathway—i.e., various “essential” steps you have to take to find the right job? 

A: Yeah, it’s extremely important, and it’s not much different than it was for me. I wanted to be a station manager and work in the TV corporate world but I had to start somewhere. We have to show a viable path, and while your skills, interests, job history, etc., may match something today, they’re all a step along the way to where you want to be tomorrow. In time, we can increase outcomes based on adding education and training programs. There are things we can build besides what people want for their outcomes. So, if you have a disability and you want to start your own distillery business, you may wait before you jump into owning one. You may go to work for a distillery or take some marketing classes and work with an entity that can do that. Our system learns that and then makes recommendations on jobs that are a fit for you today. Then as your interests grow over time the data field will expand.

Q: How do you create this virtual pathway and not exclude those people who have 20 years’ experience right now?

A: That’s a great question. Anybody can use the system. It’s going to see your 20 years’ experience and understand where you can go. Experience matters. It’s also going to understand that the young person coming out of high school or college, their interests and skills matter, too. It takes both into account. It’s an artificial intelligence job coach, is what it is really. It’s something that understands you at a unique level.

Q: What do you see as the most important function to the future of the Jobs Ability portal?

A: I think the conversational job exploration is game-changing in the disability space and, quite frankly, in all employment. Creating a conversation about what you want to do and learning from that conversation is dramatically different. I expect this chatbot feature to be up on our job portal by the end of this summer. What we’re trying to do is get people to tell us who they are so that we can match them to jobs.

Q: What’s next for Our Ability? Is there a chance you take Jobs Ability to the general public?

A: To be exponentially profitable in what we do we have to increase the usage both with people of disabilities and with the corporate side. That may be just inside disability or all inside diversity. Maybe we make an LGBT version. We may take it to the general population. The algorithm we’re building is completely different. You might see a world where LinkedIn wants this or they want it for the people in the disability space. But we have to build the product first and be exponentially profitable, and to do that our system has to do what we want it to do.

 

Real-Life Experience a Big Differentiator for Our Ability and Its Job Portal

By Dave Allen

Our Ability is the only web-based tech company in the disability employment space owned and built by people with disabilities. That real-life experience is at the center of Our Ability’s artificial intelligence-driven jobs portal, Jobs Ability, which will be launching an updated version of its conversational AI platform later this summer.

This new functionality will allow individuals with disabilities to interact with Jobs Ability in a conversational way, just as if they were talking to another human. The model then learns from the job seeker’s answers and other information they provide to make recommendations on jobs that best fit their experience and goals at the moment.

“What we’re doing inside the system is completely unique,” says Our Ability Founder and CEO John Robinson, a congenital quadruple amputee and long-time disability advocate. “We’re using generative AI to be able to rapidly assess people with disabilities—what their interests are, what their abilities are—in a conversation. A human job coach would understand what someone’s abilities are by having a similar conversation. We’re doing it through technology, by having someone upload their resume and by asking them a series of questions, then taking those answers and making job recommendations in real time.”

Who’s providing the questions for Jobs Ability? That’s where Robinson’s own personal experiences as a job seeker, employee and entrepreneur, as well as those of Our Ability’s Senior Manager of Technology and Product, Kartik Sawhney, come heavily into play. Despite being blind since birth, Sawhney became the first high school student in India to pursue an education in science beyond 11th grade, and later graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science. A Product Manager at Microsoft, Sawhney helps manage the tech giant’s AI for Accessibility program, and works with the research and product teams to identify strategic opportunities and launch products to make technology more accessible and productive for people with disabilities.

He also serves as team leader for Our Ability’s artificial intelligence and engineering initiatives, including the AI-driven Jobs Ability platform.

“People with disabilities sometimes struggle with information overload,” says Sawhney, who has a small ownership stake in Our Ability. “They have a hard time figuring out which job makes the most sense for them. That’s something no one has really cracked yet. You can’t just apply for hundreds of jobs and hope one reaches out to you. It doesn’t work like that in our community. Simplicity is key, and then being able to provide recommendations that do make sense and are personalized to each individual.”

Jobs Ability asks the user questions about their educational experience, past employment history, certifications and achievements, primary job skills and accommodation needs. It then builds a profile and then cross-references that profile in real time with 71 partner companies and more than 85,000 job postings. What truly makes this platform unique, however, is that it does more than just dive into a person’s resume and ask questions specifically about their responsibilities and skillsets.

“It wants to know what you thought about your experience, so it’s going to ask you to describe one of the best experiences you had in a past job,” says Robinson, who began posting jobs for people with disabilities on the company’s website back in 2013. “If, for example, you really enjoyed being a production assistant on multiple video shoots, it’s going to recommend you for similar jobs in video production, or perhaps in marketing. Your interests are important because they may very well be what you’re best at or what you want to do next in life. What we’re trying to do is to get people to tell us who they are so that we can match them to jobs. What they’re going to find is that there are more opportunities for them then what they might have imagined.”

Robinson applied for several hundred jobs and had more than 50 in-person interviews before he landed his first full-time job out of college. This was in the early 1990s, when stereotypes and discriminatory hiring practices toward people with disabilities were still commonplace. Despite having vast experience in analyzing TV ratings and having several reputable recommendations, too, Robinson was continually passed over because of how he looked, not how he performed.

Those personal experiences, Robinson says, serve as the foundation of Jobs Ability and the conversational piece that he and Sawhney’s team are building.

“Speaking for myself, I know my experiences were overlooked at times, not only with the first jobs that I got but also in promotion opportunities that I didn’t get,” Robinson says. “That’s real. I’ve always understood the need to put your ability to do the job ahead of everything else, and to do that on a macroscale. To do that you’ve got to get companies to focus on the ability to do the job, and you’ve got to get candidates like myself to focus on what you can do and lean into that more than anything else. That’s where we’re different. Some of our competitors have been started by hedge-fund dollars or are owned by universities who saw a need in our marketplace. Some are specific-disability focused. We’re not any of that. We’re people with various disabilities building a business that will be profitable and that understands our marketplace better than anyone else.”

As Robinson points out, Our Ability’s mission is to not only connect more individuals with disabilities to jobs, but to also empower employers to better understand and leverage the increasing value of this growing workforce. Part of that is writing better job descriptions for people with disabilities. That’s why, in addition to the AI-driven platform, Our Ability is also in the process of developing an AI ableist language filter to automatically review and recommend changes to a company’s job listing that will make it more inclusive. The new language tool, known as Abli.ai, acts much like spellcheck, only it provides companies with suggestions on how it can improve the language inside a job description, make it less hurtful and more impactful toward individuals with disabilities.

Many of the job listings currently available through Jobs Ability have been accessibility checked and verified through Abli.ai. (You’ll see the Abli.ai logo adjacent to these job descriptions.) Our Ability also expects to have this tool available for purchase by its business clients this year. It’s just one more example of how Our Ability merges its own real-life experiences with emerging technology to create a more inclusive hiring culture between employers and people with disabilities.

“Let’s face it, there’s still bias and discrimination against people with disabilities, even here in the U.S.,” Sawhney says. “So how do we make sure we have partners who are not just doing it for branding or to improve their reputations, but really want to have individuals with disabilities with high potential work for them and contribute to their product development? By curating those partners and having this technology where people with disabilities are able to connect with those partners in a meaningful, quick, simple way, is something we do that others don’t.”

And creating technology that is grounded in real-life reality is just as paramount, Sawhney says.

“Nothing can be more important than this because if you don’t understand the problem, your solution is not going to help people,” Sawhney says. “If you don’t talk to people with disabilities, if you haven’t experienced what they’ve been through, you think you’re doing them a favor by developing something that is tech-enabled, and then no one uses your product. That’s the frustration John and I have seen over and over again. If you don’t know what you’re developing, if you haven’t faced the problem or are aware of the realities and what people with disabilities go through, you’re going to develop a fancy AI tool but who’s going to use it? That understanding is something that comes from experience.”

 

Job Opportunity: Co-Op Intern In Vivo Pharmacology (6 months) Cambridge MA | Pfizer

Why Patients Need You

Pfizer’s purpose is to deliver breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. Research and Development is at the heart of fulfilling Pfizer’s purpose as we work to translate advanced science and technologies into the therapies and vaccines that matter most. Whether you are in the discovery sciences, ensuring drug safety and efficacy or supporting clinical trials, you will apply innovative design and process development capabilities to accelerate and bring the best-in-class medicines to patients around the world.

What You Will Achieve

This is a 6-month, full-time opportunity ideal for a recent college graduate.  As a co-op Intern in the in vivo pharmacology team, you will learn and experience the end-to-end process of in vivo pharmacology from the operations aspect of animal care and welfare, through animal handling and animal techniques, efficacy study conducts to tissue processing and data acquisition.

The Internal Medicine Research Unit (IMRU) is committed to finding cures for metabolic diseases including obesity, diabetes, renal disease, and heart failure. Our goal is to build a research team of driven scientists focused on identifying and developing novel therapies to improve metabolic homeostasis in patients afflicted with these diseases. We aim to recruit a future scientist who is willing to learn and implement preclinical in vivo support for drug discovery projects and new target validation.

This co-op scientist will join biology teams within IMRU and contribute to in vivo studies to assess efficacy of novel therapy candidates as well as validate new drug targets. The successful candidate is expected to learn and execute all aspects of in vivo experiments in rodent models. A desire to understand the underlying causes of metabolic diseases and basic metabolic pathways involved is essential and we look for a driven scientist motivated to have a deep understanding of the development of the diseases. It is your hard work and focus that will make Pfizer ready to achieve new milestones and help patients across the globe.

How You Will Achieve It

Learn all areas of in vivo pharmacology to support studies. These include animal handling, dosing, bleeding, necropsy, tissue collection and wet lab sample processingContribute to in vivo experiments to address key mechanistic and pharmacological scientific questionsQuantify/translate experimental results, communicate/ present data and provide recommendations for next stepsCollaborate effectively with peers to support projects and workgroup goalsMaintain high-quality and detailed experimental recordsStay current on all departmental and corporate training

Qualifications

Required :

Associates degree, or BS/BA degree a plusWillingness to work with animals including rodent in vivo dosing and handling techniquesSome knowledge of tissue dissection and tissue preparationCandidate is expected to be highly detail-oriented, with excellent communication skillsExcellent organization and planning skills, the ability to work in a demanding environment independently or as part of a team; strong motivation with a dedicated work ethicStrong attention to detail and ability to collaborate and work in team environmentMust be immediately authorized to work in the U.S. without the employer’s sponsorship. This job or any derived full-time opportunity is not eligible for permanent residence (green card) sponsorship under our guidelines.

Preferred:

Related experience in animal researchExperience with animal tissues and processingExperience in standard mammalian cell cultureThe successful candidate will be an enthusiastic and adaptive learner who is able to multitask and be comfortable working in a team environment

PHYSICAL/MENTAL/JOB REQUIREMENTS:

Must be able to wear standard PPE (lab coat/safety shoes/glasses/etc).Must not have animal allergiesMust be willing to work occasional weekends due to the nature of in vivo work

At Pfizer we want to do our best to support the needs of all our colleagues. Pfizer provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities, disabled veterans, and applicants requiring accommodations related to childbirth, pregnancy, or related medical conditions, including the need to express breast milk. If you have a disability and you require accommodations for the application and/or interview processes, you can contact us at DisabilityRecruitment@Pfizer.com.

We are an equal opportunity employer.