Epidemiologist / Health Data Scientist on OpenSAFELY in the Bennett Institute

Applications are invited for an epidemiologist, statistician or health data scientist to work in our OpenSAFELY platform, deployed across the full electronic health records of 55 million patients.

The successful applicant will be helping to lead a new way of delivering health data science. OpenSAFELY is a highly secure, modular, open source data analysis platform, combining best practice from both academia and the open source software community.

The post-holder will have the opportunity to be involved in various platform-related activities, including (but not restricted to):

• Building tools and dashboards to gain insights from routinely-collected health data
• Innovating processes and tools for statistical disclosure control of outputs released from OpenSAFELY
• Developing, maintaining, and documenting reproducible analytic pipelines for evaluating trends and variation in clinical practice
• Producing automated data quality checks and data validity reports
• Co-piloting external OpenSAFELY users

There are also several ongoing research projects within the Bennett Institute using OpenSAFELY. You will have the opportunity to contribute to these projects.

• NIHR-funded research to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines for respiratory viruses
• Wellcome supported NHS Talking Therapies research
• NIHR-funded Winter pressures and service delivery planning
• NHS England’s Primary Care and Medicines Analytics Unit

If you have a specific interest in working in any of these research areas, please indicate this in your cover letter, highlighting any relevant experience. We’re happy to answer any questions about the projects prior to applying.

The Bennett Institute is a mixed team of clinicians, software developers, policy experts, data scientists, and academic researchers, all pooling skills and knowledge. We have a strong track record of delivering high impact research in Nature, Lancet and BMJ; real-world impact on policy and clinical practice; and high impact services such as OpenSAFELY, OpenPrescribing and TrialsTracker.

Our mission is to create a modern, open, collaborative ecosystem for health research. We do this by shipping code, delivering papers, building capacity, and advocating for new ways of working. We aim to lead by example: recurring tasks are turned into packages and libraries; all code is shared openly for review and re-use; analyses are delivered in re-executable notebooks for others to read, evaluate, re-purpose, and learn with.

We want to meet outstanding researchers who share this vision and have, or can rapidly develop, the skills needed to deliver it with us. We are particularly interested in researchers who will contribute to our open science community-building work, our codebase, our open teaching resources, or our policy work.

You will report to one of our Research team leads. You can read more at www.bennett.ox.ac.uk and OpenSAFELY.org.

We are actively seeking to increase our team’s diversity and welcome applications from those in under-represented groups.

You will be based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Radcliffe Primary Care Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG as your normal place of work, but you will be able to agree a pattern of regular remote working with your line manager.

The position is funded by the Wellcome Trust, for a duration of two years in the first instance.

For further information or discuss the post please contact William Hulme (william.hulme@phc.ox.ac.uk).

“Committed to equality and valuing diversity”

The closing date for applications is 12:00 noon on Friday 3 October 2025. 

Interviews are expected to be held during the week commencing Monday 20 October 2025.

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