Research Officer Position Description

Role kind Casual

Hours Up to 8 hours per week

Award SCHADS 5.1

Location Melbourne, Victoria (includes regional residents in commuting distance
from Melbourne)

Timing Project concludes June 2026

Reports to The Loop Australia National Research lead (with some operational
reporting to The Loop Australia Drug Checking Director)

**About The Loop Australia**

The Loop Australia is a not-for-profit organisation established in 2018 to develop the sustainable
provision of drug checking services in Australia. We are a sister organisation to The Loop UK which
formed in 2013 and has provided drug checking for the public since 2016. The Loop Australia has been
a mostly volunteer-based organisation, with teams of chemists, health professionals and researchers
based in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

The Loop Australia Vision: A safer society where everyone can access accurate, timely, and relevant
information to make more informed decisions about drugs.

The Loop Australia Mission: Deliver a world-class drug checking service and disseminate information
about drugs to individuals, service providers and policy makers.

**Background**

In 2024, the Victorian Health Minister announced the Victorian Government's support for the delivery
of drug checking services. Victoria Health sought invitations from service providers to deliver services
from both fixed locations and mobile locations (e.g. music festivals). A partnership led by Youth
Support and Advocacy (YSAS) in partnership with Harm Reduction Victoria (HRVic), Melbourne Health
(MH), Youth Projects (YP) and The Loop Australia (TLA) was successful and has been contracted to
deliver the service. Service delivery commenced in Victoria in December 2024, and will provide drug

checking services at 10 festivals or events through the 18 month trial, with a fixed site to be
established mid-2025. The contract ends June 2026.

**Position Overview**
The purpose of this role is to oversee the data collection and data reporting requirements of the
Victorian Drug Checking Service.

**Duties and responsibilities of the Research O?icer include**:

- Supporting the DCD and Lead chemist to provide Training and support to service delivery sta?

in data collection
- Data cleaning and data monitoring
- With supervision from the National Research Lead, report creation after events and at month
- end for fixed site for:

- DCS Internal report
- DH report
- Preparing other regular reports of routine data collection
- Overseeing routine client outcomes data collection including client satisfaction measures
- Database system improvements
- work closely with the Dev ops engineer and the DCS

leadership team to improve the database in relation to collection of data, coding of report
running and data outputs
- Work with the Loop Australia National Research lead on research including obtaining research

ethics and coordinating publication of routine service operational data
- Work with the Loop research action group to support research related to drug checking that

includes the Victorian service
- Working with the DevOps engineer, prepare the dataset for use in a planned public data

dashboard
**Hours**
- Variable hours up to 8 hours per week - increase after events and at month end
- Some hours will be onsite at festival and events

**Qualifications, skills and experience**
- Experience in a research se?ing that includes obtaining research ethics approval and

preparing publications for peer reviewed journals
- Experience working with contemporary data systems
- Demonstrated capacity to work with quantitative data, including understanding of data
- cleaning processes
- Working knowledge of statistical coding in programs like Stata, R or SPSS (or other alternative

programs that can be used to clean and process quantitative data in an e?icient and
reproducible manner)
- Excellent people skills to enable collaboration across a geographically dispersed team
- Familiarity with Google Suite and Slack communication tools
- Capacity and desire to work on-site at (hot and dusty) music festivals to handle twice daily

reporting requirements and ad hoc data queries

**Highly Desirable**
- Drug literacy - an understanding of unregulated drug markets, key drug-related terminologies,

and how drug checking and harm reduction services work
- Experience working in a research environment in the alcohol and other drugs field

**Key Selection Criteria**
1. Undergraduate, honours or masters qualifications that include a research component in a
social science or data science discipline (desirable - making progress towards or having
completed a PhD)

2. Demonstrated capacity to process raw data into reports including cleaning, checking and
displaying data using reproducible methods

3. Demonstrated capacity to troubleshoot and test the data where problems arise
4. The capacity to work in a high pace environment on-site at festivals where reports and

responses to data queries are required under time pre