Postdoctoral Researcher - Health Services and Health Economics Research

About the role

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michael Harhay. Department: Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics. Number of Positions: 1. Open to applications from U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. The research groups of Drs. Scott Halpern, Michael Harhay, and Ari Friedman at the University of Pennsylvania invite applications for a postdoctoral researcher in health services research (HSR) and health economics. Ideal candidates are (bio)statisticians with training and interest in health economics and cost‑effectiveness analysis, with >1 year of post‑doctoral experience eligible for research associate consideration.

Responsibilities

• Develop estimation strategies that use multiple sources of plausibly exogenous variation to identify clinically and economically relevant quantities of interest.
• Investigate natural experiments in the emergency department and ICU tied to fundamental economic questions, supported by additional clinical and operational data‑gathering infrastructure.
• Explore distributed regression analyses across a coalition of health systems on emergency department boarding and crowding.
• Contribute statistical and cost‑effectiveness expertise to ongoing and planned studies across the three research groups.
• Lead manuscript writing aimed at leading medical journals, in addition to health services research outlets.
• Present findings at conferences.
• Clean and structure EHR data for analyses.
• Maintain careful and reproducible documentation of datasets/code and lead the creation of an organized catalog of existing datasets.
• Record methodological decisions in detail and use those notes to draft the Methods sections of manuscripts.
• Write data‑sharing and replication plans.
• Prepare cuts of cleaned datasets for rotating students on an occasional basis.
• Serve as a point of contact between students in the lab and the faculty, assigning weekly tasks, monitoring progress, and supporting students' development.
• Maintain coding infrastructure for weekly reports tracking study progress and data completeness across active projects.
• Coordinate co‑author feedback and track manuscript submissions.
• Develop and update training guides, study manuals, and materials supporting consistent research operations.

Qualifications

• Doctoral degree in biostatistics, statistics, economics, epidemiology, health services research, or a related quantitative field, ideally with training or demonstrated interest in economics and cost‑effectiveness analysis.
• Experience working with healthcare data and large relational datasets, with an understanding of the level of rigor the work requires.
• Proficiency in a statistical programming language such as R or Python.
• Skill in data cleaning and management, statistical and econometric analysis (including cost‑effectiveness methods), manuscript writing and editing, research operations coordination, and supervision and mentorship of students.
• A view of data cleaning as essential to good research rather than as a chore.
• Ability to work well in teams and to manage time independently while coordinating among several cooperative principal investigators.
• A firm commitment to preserving the privacy of patient health information, including guarding against inadvertent disclosure within complex data‑processing pipelines.