Positions available: Up to two postdoctoral fellowships for 18-24 months are available in the Department of Population Health at New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center to work on population health- and health equity- focused research and advancing policy impact with investigators leading the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded City Health Dashboard (www.cityhealthdashboard.org) and the soon-to-launch Congressional District Health Dashboard.

Responsibilities: The fellowship will focus on mentored, applied research working with a dynamic team dedicated to delivering impactful, spatially granular and novel data to policymakers to inform decision-making.  The wealth of data amassed and portfolio of engagement activities with policymakers offers tremendous opportunities for innovative scholarship and the interface between research and action. Our investigators (a diverse group of epidemiologists, geographers, physician researchers, and urban policy researchers) seek approaches to actualize the promise of “big data” to generate nimble and actionable information for municipal and federal policymakers, congressional staff, and local communities.  We have amassed a large amount of data spanning the United States and also parsed to city boundaries for more than 900 cities, with many metrics available at the census tract-level.  We place particular focus on measures of the physical, social and economic environment that pertain to health and health equity, as well as small-area measures of racial equity. Opportunities exist to link area-level data to large individual-level data sources, as well as to engage policymaker end-users to identify their needs and partner on research. Emphasis will be placed on identifying policy-relevant research questions. The fellow will participate in ongoing research and translational projects and lead studies of their own, with mentoring from Drs. Marc Gourevitch, Lorna Thorpe, Neil Kleiman and others. Examples of opportunities include participating in or leading studies on the relationship between typologies of cities and health outcomes, examining health effects of redlining and racial residential segregation, or assessing the impacts of either novel neighborhood-level measures of economic security or air pollution on health. The fellow will also have the opportunity to develop grant proposals.

Professional environment:  The fellowship will take place within the Department of Population Health. Faculty members here conduct cutting-edge work on studying the effects of municipal policies and modifiable community determinants on health, measuring social determinants of health, and the use of electronic health records for population estimation. Outstanding training opportunities for multidisciplinary research are available in the Department of Population Health, which has divisions in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Healthcare Delivery Science, Medical Ethics, Health and Behavior, and Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science.  The fellow will have the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues engaged in the City Health Dashboard project, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded initiative to bring measures of health and social drivers to policymakers in cities of all sizes. State-of-the-art research resources are available.  

New York University is an equal opportunity employer and provides a drug-free workplace.  For further information about the Division of Epidemiology, please visit our website (https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/population-health/divisions-sections-centers/epidemiology/).

Application process: To apply, please send a cover letter, CV and contact information for three professional references to Gabriella Macias at gabriella.macias@nyulangone.org.

Applicants should have a doctorate in a relevant field, such as epidemiology, health policy, social/behavioral health, public policy or equivalent degree and have excellent qualifications in, and demonstrated commitment to, health equity and team-based translational research.  We are interested in candidates with either:

• Experience in working with large administrative data sources, performing multi-level analyses using small area neighborhood data, and familiarity with causal inference methods for observational research.
• Experience in conducting original policy research and analysis to inform population health and health equity issues, and synthesizing health policy issues to different audiences in order to impact policy and practice.

We are seeking applicants with strong writing skills and experience with literature synthesis, and we offer a robust environment for postdoctoral fellows that includes dedicated mentorship, joint training activities, and resources to travel and present at conferences.