Postdoctoral Position in the HMS/BIDMC Surgical Informatics Lab at DBMI

About the Position

The Surgical Informatics Lab at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) is seeking a postdoctoral fellow with skills in clinical informatics and machine learning to develop clinical prediction tools at the intersection of surgery and informatics. This position is ideal for someone interested in translating algorithms into actionable insights within a year.

Responsibilities

• Develop clinical prediction tools at the intersection of surgery and clinical informatics.
• Translate algorithms into action within a year.
• Work on two significant projects: the Hospital Opioid Use Project and the Ulcerative Colitis Surgical Trajectories Project.
• Collaborate with experts in surgery and machine learning to create scalable web tools.

Requirements

• Proficiency in R, Python, and SQL.
• Statistical skills in regression, cohort matching, inference, and Bayesian techniques.
• Machine learning methods including clustering, deep learning, and temporal techniques.

Projects

Hospital Opioid Use Project

• Identify variations and patterns in peri-surgical treatment that predict opioid consumption after surgical discharge.
• Develop predictive and classification models for post-surgical opioid use and prescribing.
• Leverage national claims and opioid use data to build models.

Ulcerative Colitis Surgical Trajectories Project

• Explainable machine learning models to identify trajectories of ulcerative colitis care.
• Predict transitions from chronic medical management to surgical planning.
• Use existing cohort of temporal medical and pharmacy claims data.

Data Resources

• Aetna, Inc. medical and pharmacy claims for over 70M patients over 10 years.
• BIDMC medical and pharmacy claims data organized to 1997.
• BIDMC medical record data, including all medication administrations, lab, surgical notes, OR data, and cost and reimbursement information over 7 years.
• Opioid use data for 7000 patients across 7 hospital systems from the US.

How to Apply

Submit Curriculum Vitae, including a list of publications, or questions to Dr. Gabriel Brat at [email protected].

About the Company

The Surgical Informatics Lab is a new hospital–university data and research collaborative of informatics faculty in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Harvard Medical School and surgeon researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Our program has graduate students, surgical residents, and research and clinical faculty who are developing collaborative tools to transform surgical care using prediction/classification modeling and surgeon- and patient-centered informatics tools.

© 2026 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College