Research Assistant - Breeding Data Management

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture seeks suitable Nigeria nationals for the positions below at the Institute's Headquarters in Ibadan.

Position: Research Assistant - Breeding Data Management

Contract: 3-years renewable contract

Location: Ibadan

Closing Date: 2 October 2026

Duties

• Support the Breeding Data Manager in the adoption, implementation, and routine use of the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) for storing, managing, retrieving, and reporting breeding information.
• Assist breeding teams with electronic data capture, including the preparation, testing, and validation of digital field books and data-collection templates.
• Curate essential breeding data, including locations, traits, germplasm records, pedigrees, experimental metadata, and germplasm attributes, before loading them into EBS.
• Use R scripts or other reproducible tools for data cleaning, validation, duplicate identification, germplasm matching, site curation, data transformation, and routine reporting across breeding datasets.
• Execute database queries and extract data into approved templates, reports, dashboards, and other formats based on clearly defined requirements.
• Update and maintain Power BI dashboards for monitoring breeding activities, data quality, phenotypic-data completeness, germplasm information, experimental metadata, training activities, and other agreed performance indicators.
• Apply institutional and international research data management standards and best practices, including crop ontologies, trait dictionaries, standard phenotyping protocols, data-quality rules, controlled vocabularies, templates, and digital field books.
• Maintain appropriate documentation of data-curation activities, data uploads, analytical scripts, database queries, dashboard updates, quality-control results, user-support requests, and completed assignments.
• Prepare periodic updates on completed activities, data-quality findings, analytical outputs, dashboard status, user-support needs, system-related challenges, and recommended follow-up actions.
• Perform any other job-related duties that may be assigned by the Supervisor.