AI and Data Science Specialist Support – Health and Extreme Weather Project

What the buyer is asking for

Title: AI and Data Science Specialist Support – Health and Extreme Weather Project Agency: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Sub-Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH), Clinical Center (CC) Department: Critical Care Medicine Department (CCMD), Clinical Epidemiology Section NAICS Code: 541715 – Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology) PSC: R425 – Support–Professional: Engineering/Technical Intended Source: University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Place of Performance: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland Period of Performance: Period 1: October 15, 2026 – October 14, 2027 Period 2: October 15, 2027 – October 14, 2028 Response Deadline: October 5, 2026, at 1:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) DESCRIPTION The National Institutes of Health (NIH), Clinical Center (CC), Critical Care Medicine Department (CCMD), Clinical Epidemiology Section intends to procure specialized Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science Specialist support for the NIH Health and Extreme Weather Intramural study. The Health and Extreme Weather study is a two-year project examining whether emergency department and hospital overcrowding worsens during extreme heat and how these conditions affect mortality. The project also seeks to apply artificial intelligence, including large language models (LLMs), to Emergency Medical Services (EMS) free-text narratives to identify patients with heat exposure that may not be captured through structured coding. The requirement involves specialized technical support in artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models, data science, and analysis of large and heterogeneous healthcare datasets. Required support may include, but is not limited to: • Technical consultation and study support related to research questions, data feasibility, analytical approaches, and study/evaluation design; • Data preparation, exploratory analysis, information extraction, and development or adaptation of AI, machine-learning, and LLM methods; • AI/LLM prototyping, prompting, fine-tuning, workflow development, and comparison of alternative modeling approaches; • Evaluation design, reference-data development, performance assessment, error analysis, and generalizability and robustness testing; • Development and evaluation of scalable machine-learning pipelines and model-evaluation frameworks; and • Preparation of technical summaries, analyses, methods descriptions, figures, reports, presentations, and manuscripts as required by the project. INTENDED SOURCE The Government intends to procure these services from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Government's market research indicates that UMD possesses the specialized technical expertise required to support this effort. The proposed technical specialist possesses Ph.D.-level expertise in Electrical and Computer Engineering/Computer Science, with demonstrated experience in large-scale AI and foundation/language-model development and evaluation, scalable machine-learning pipelines, information extraction from unstructured text, and rigorous model-validation methodologies. The NIH Clinical Center's Critical Care Medicine Department also has an ongoing machine-learning/AI effort with the same UMD contractor. The Government intends to leverage the iterative learning, technical knowledge, and core algorithms already developed through that effort in support of this new AI requirement. This continuity is expected to reduce duplication of effort, conserve Government resources, and facilitate timely execution of the Health and Extreme Weather study. UMD's proximity to NIH also facilitates in-person technical collaboration and integration between the NIH Clinical Center's Clinical Epidemiology Section and UMD's AI/ML expertise. NOTICE OF INTENT This notice is not a request for…