My basis is as an extraordinary research scientist in a specific basic science field that has strong overlap with data science. My I-140 is still pending (filed on June 1, I have a concurrent filing for a 485). The contract work that I would be doing would also leverage the skills that form the basis for my EB1 petition (so not work that would be totally outside of my stated expertise)

You should contact me so that I can get the specifics but it sounds like you should be able to do contract work without this affecting your green card application. To be clear, the issue is not being able to do contract work, the EAD allows you to do this; the issue is whether this could impact your green card application.