Postdoctoral Researcher in Occupational Epidemiology – The Future of Work Full-time NEW

Postdoctoral Researcher in Occupational Epidemiology – The Future of Work

Join us at the forefront of occupational health research. The New World of Work Research Group studies how changing labour markets affect health and well-being. Our work combines large-scale register data, advanced causal inference, and interdisciplinary collaboration to understand and improve working conditions in modern labour markets.

We focus particularly on precarious employment, return-to-work processes, and the health consequences of labour market transitions. The ambition is not only to produce high-quality science, but also to develop new ways of studying work and health that are relevant for policy and society.

Your Mission

We are looking for a highly skilled quantitative researcher who is curious, creative, and willing to take methodological risks. Someone who is comfortable working with large administrative datasets, but who also enjoys questioning standard approaches and exploring new analytical strategies.

If your default solution is to run another Cox model, this may not be the right place. We are interested in people who want to experiment with new causal designs, modelling approaches, and ways of extracting insight from complex longitudinal data.

You should be comfortable pushing ideas further than they initially seem reasonable—and have the technical skills to test whether they actually work.

This is a two-year postdoctoral research position. During your first year you will:

• Conduct quantitative analyses using causal inference and longitudinal modelling to study how adverse life events influence labour market participation and health.
• Analyse return-to-work trajectories using national social insurance and register data.
• Contribute to the development of new analytical strategies for large population cohorts.
• Support and co-supervise PhD students within the research group.

During the second year you will continue to develop and design new studies and start to develop your own line of research.

Your Profile

To be eligible for employment as a postdoctoral researcher, a PhD or a foreign degree deemed to be equivalent to a Swedish PhD is required. This eligibility requirement must be fulfilled at the latest at the time of the employment decision. Completion of your doctoral degree within the last three years is considered an advantage. If there are special reasons, your degree may have been completed earlier.

In addition to the eligibility requirements, we are looking for candidates with the following skills and competencies:

Research Expertise:

• Strong background in epidemiology, public health, labor economics, quantitiatve sociology, or a related field.
• Proficiency in advanced quantitative methods, such as longitudinal data analysis, survival analysis, or machine learning.

Technical Skills:

• Proficiency in statistical software such as R or Python
• Familiarity with handling large datasets, including cleaning, managing, and analyzing complex data.
• Experience with tools for data visualization and presenting research findings effectively.

Additional Merits:

• Knowledge of labor market dynamics, non-standard employment, or social security systems.
• Experience with open-access tools, code development, or GitHub repositories.
• Experience analyzing individual or group-level trajectories over time using advanced modeling techniques, such as latent growth models, sequence analysis, trajectory clustering, target trial emulation etc with applications to labor market or health outcomes.

What We Offer

You will join an ambitious and supportive research environment where methodological creativity is encouraged. The group works closely with international collaborators and policymakers, and we actively support:

• Development of new research ideas and grant applications
• International collaborations and conference participation
• Interdisciplinary projects across epidemiology, economics, and data science
• Career development through supervision experience and advanced training

This position offers an opportunity to work with exceptional data, tackle important societal questions, and help shape the future of occupational epidemiology.

We offer a creative and inspiring environment with wide-ranging expertise and interests. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. At Karolinska Institutet, we conduct successful medical research and hold the largest range of medical education in Sweden. At KI, you get to meet researchers working with a wide range of specialisms and methods, giving you ample opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with the various scientific fields within medicine and health. It is the crossover collaborations, which have pushed KI to where it is today, at the forefront of global research. Several of the people you meet in healthcare are educated at KI. A close relationship with the health care providers is important for creating groundbreaking top quality education and research. Karolinska Institutet is also a state university, which entitles you to several benefits through our collective agreement.

Location: Solna

Application

An employment application must contain the following documents in English or Swedish:

• PhD certificate
• A complete resumé, including date of the thesis defence, title of the thesis, previous academic positions, academic title, current position, academic distinctions, and committee work
• A complete list of publications
• A summary of current work (no more than one page)

The application is to be submitted through the Varbi recruitment system.

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