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 research projects and platform-related activities, including (but not restricted to):

• Evaluating the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for respiratory viruses;
• Documenting national trends and variation in disease, medicines use, and clinical activity;
• Building tools and dashboards to gain insights from routinely-collected health data;
• Innovating processes for statistical disclosure control of outputs released from OpenSAFELY;
• Developing and maintaining regular reports to help OpenSAFELY users understand the underlying data and plan research activity;
• Developing and delivering training/teaching for working with routinely-collected data for research and planning;
• Co-piloting external OpenSAFELY users.

If you have a specific interest in working on any of these areas - for example, if you have prior experience - please indicate this in your cover letter.

The successful applicant will hold a relevant degree and experience in one or more of: epidemiology, data science, statistics, clinical informatics, medicine. You should also demonstrate the ability to write analytic code in at least one commonly used language, as well as having strong knowledge of routinely collected NHS patient data or clinical informatics.

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, OpenCodeCounts, 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 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 Dr Andrea Schaffer: andrea.schaffer@phc.ox.ac.uk.

Committed to equality and valuing diversity.

The closing date for applications is 12:00 noon on Friday 11 December 2026.

Interviews are expected to be held during the week commencing 18 January 2027.

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