Postdoctoral Researcher in Real World Evidence for Knee Osteoarthritis

Your impact begins here

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to help advance PROBE, an Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) public-private partnership focused on patient-relevant osteoarthritis endpoints using big data. You will be anchored in Novo Nordisk’s R&D Real World Evidence (RWE) area, with access to its scientific expertise and support network, and work closely with our Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) team and partners across the consortium.

Your main research focus will be PROBE Work Package 4 (WP4): analysing patient characteristics and identifying factors (such as clinical variables and biomarkers) associated with osteoarthritis progression, meaningful patient subgroups, and potential surrogates of clinically relevant outcomes. You will also help establish the infrastructure and authorised access needed for analysis in the federated database network and contribute to deliverables across other work packages.

What you'll bring

You have a PhD in epidemiology, biostatistics, data science, biomedical informatics, computational biology, public health, or a related field, together with experience analysing complex health data. We expect you to bring:

• Strong programming and reproducible analysis skills in R or Python, knowledge of modern machine learning/AI methods, and sound statistical reasoning.

• Experience with observational, registry, electronic health record, clinical, or other longitudinal patient-level datasets.

• The ability to formulate research questions, assess data fitness, interpret results responsibly, and explain findings to both technical and nontechnical colleagues.

• The organisation and initiative to move collaborative research forward across teams and institutions, with fluent written and spoken English.

• Experience in osteoarthritis or musculoskeletal research, patient stratification, biomarker research, distributed or federated analytics, and health-data governance would be an advantage.

You do not need experience in every area to apply.

What you'll do

• Design and conduct reproducible analyses of patient demographics, clinical characteristics, disease burden, and longitudinal outcomes across relevant osteoarthritis datasets.

• Investigate prognostic variables, patterns of disease progression, patient subgroups, treatment effectiveness, and candidate biomarkers or surrogate outcomes in support of relevant research questions.

• Work with data owners, WP3 infrastructure partners, internal data specialists, and governance teams to help establish data connections, permissions, harmonised definitions, and practical access to the federated database network.

• Apply appropriate statistical and machine-learning methods to heterogeneous real-world data, documenting assumptions, data quality, limitations, and validation results.

• Translate findings into scientific reports, presentations, publications, and consortium deliverables, including contributions to other areas where your analyses are relevant.

• Coordinate closely with the R&D RWE team and PPP team, and communicate progress and results to multidisciplinary public and private partners.

Who you'll work with

Within R&D RWE, you will work alongside epidemiologists and data scientists who use real-world patient data to inform disease understanding and research decisions. The PPP office will be a close partner in consortium coordination, scientific communication, and delivery of PROBE commitments.

About PROBE

Knee osteoarthritis affects people differently, making it difficult to predict progression and identify who may benefit from specific treatments. PROBE brings together patient data and expertise across academic, healthcare, industry, and patient partners to improve patient stratification, predictive models, endpoints, and clinical trial design. Its federated approach is intended to enable analysis across datasets while respecting applicable governance and privacy requirements.

What you can expect here

Work location: Søborg, Denmark.

Contract length : 2 years fixed-term contract

Expected start date : 1st January 2027

Salary: For this role, the Annual Base Salary ranges from 570,200 to 838,100 DKK (DK), corresponding to the level of the position.

The placement within the salary range will be assessed during the recruitment process based on the candidate’s skills, competencies, knowledge, and relevant experience.

Incentives and Benefits : The salary package may include short-term and/or long-term incentives as well as other employee benefits based on position level, location, functional area and relevant market benchmarks.

Learn more about our Reward Philosophy here .

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