Decision Scientist III - Quality and Patient Safety initiative

About the role

The Decision Scientist III supports the Quality and Patient Safety initiative (QPSi) within the UF College of Medicine by applying decision-science approaches to improve patient safety, care quality, and healthcare operations across UF Health and partner institutions.

Responsibilities

• Supports the QPSi by evaluating clinical and operational decisions through modeling options, constraints, tradeoffs, and expected outcomes.
• Develops and evaluates multi-objective optimization approaches to balance patient outcomes, quality/value of care metrics, clinician workload, and workflow feasibility.
• Uses offline reinforcement learning or related policy-evaluation methods when historical data are strong enough to compare decision strategies.
• Builds models that represent changes over time in patients, care pathways, resources, or bottlenecks.
• Tests how recommendations change under different assumptions, data limitations, and implementation constraints.
• Produces analyses, documentation, and code that can be reviewed, reused, and extended by the broader QPSi team.

Requirements

• Applicants must have a Bachelor's Degree in data science, statistics, bioinformatics, analytics, or similar field and five years of experience; a Master's Degree in data science, statistics, bioinformatics, analytics, or similar field and three years of experience; or a Doctoral Degree in data science, statistics, bioinformatics, analytics, or similar field and one year of experience.

Qualifications

• Strong Python skills for data analysis, optimization, simulation, statistical modeling, and reproducible workflows.
• Experience with SQL and relational data sources, especially longitudinal or time-stamped real-world data.
• Demonstrated experience with multi-objective optimization, constrained optimization, operations research, dynamic programming, Bayesian optimization, or closely related methods.
• Experience constructing and interpreting Pareto fronts or Pareto regions, including approaches for robustness, uncertainty, outlier sensitivity, and clinically realistic comparator selection.
• Experience using reinforcement learning or policy-evaluation methods with historical or observational data.
• Experience modeling systems that evolve over time, such as patient trajectories, workflows, resource use, or sequential care decisions.
• Ability to define objective functions, reward functions, constraints, action spaces, state representations, and evaluation metrics with input from stakeholders.
• Practical judgment about when optimization or reinforcement learning methods are appropriate, and how to evaluate safety, uncertainty, bias, and implementation risk.
• Experience with healthcare data, EHR-derived data, or clinical quality improvement is strongly preferred.
• Experience with large-scale computing environments such as SLURM, Dask, GPU computing, or high-performance computing systems is preferred.
• Familiarity with version control, code review, testing, documentation, and other software engineering practices.
• Able to explain tradeoffs, assumptions, limitations, and uncertainty to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Resourceful, collaborative, and comfortable working independently in ambiguous interdisciplinary project settings.

Skills

• Python
• SQL
• Reinforcement Learning
• Offline Reinforcement Learning
• Policy Evaluation
• Multi-Objective Optimization
• Dynamic Programming
• Bayesian Optimization
• Pareto Fronts
• Pareto Regions
• Healthcare Data
• EHR Derived Data
• Large Scale Computing Environments
• Version Control
• Code Review
• Testing
• Documentation

Benefits

• Low-cost State Health Plans: Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• Life and Disability Insurance
• Generous Retirement Options
• Comprehensive Paid Time Off Packages with 10+ paid holidays, paid family, sick and vacation leave
• Exceptional Personal and Professional Development Opportunities: Access to UF Training & Organizational Development programs, leadership development, LinkedIn Learning, and more
• Tuition Assistance through the UF Employee Education Program
• Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Eligible

Pay

$85,000 - $105,000 annually

Schedule

Full-time