R sig jobs - Aug 2011 - Short term position in Rome: R trainer and developer

Hi

Our organisation, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
has launched a small pilot project to encourage the use of R within FAO. In this
regard, we are looking for a motivated person with strong skills in R, able to
teach R to beginners, and to develop specific packages on request.

More specifically, the candidate will be given the challenge to build
staff's capacities in R. This will involve setting-up a series of
introductory training sessions, organising a series of seminars inviting
external speakers and offering on-demand training on specific packages/topics.
Besides capacity building, the candidate will also be asked to develop/improve
packages on demand, most likely on data exchange (xml-sdmx and REST APIs).

FAO is an international non-profit organization based in Rome, Italy, focusing
on areas such as food security, climate change and agricultural development. The
candidate will work in the Economic and Social: Statistics division (ESS) and
will have the opportunity to interact with many statisticians at FAO who work on
very diverse fields such as epidemiology, agronomy, household survey analysis,
econometric time-series or geo-spatial analysis.

For more informations or to apply, please write to Matthieu.Stigler at fao.org.
If you are interested, please send your CV and, instead of a cover letter,
answer briefly the questions at bottom of e-mail. Kindly also give an estimate
of your salary expectation (upon which contract duration will depend, probably 3
to 6 months due to limited budget of pilot project). Contract start is as early
as possible, hopefully September.

Best regards

Matthieu Stigler

Questions to answer if interested:
-What experience do you possess with R (please mention packages developed if
any)?,
-Do you possess any experience in teaching?
-Are you familiar with one of XML, ggplot2, rehsape? Parallel computing? Do you
use LaTeX (beamer) and Sweave?
-Would you write a package in S3 or S4? Explain your choice.
-If you were given free time, what would you develop in R?