Applied Biostatistics Postdoc - Clinical Trial Simulation

The global biostatistics and data sciences (gBDS) at Boehringer Ingelheim is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to help modernize clinical trial simulations. The goal is to use AI and agentic workflows to speed up the setup of simulations: gathering relevant data, drafting data-informed priors and design assumptions, and making scenarios easier to iterate on. Statisticians and clinical teams curate and validate every assumption and remain in charge of the simulation and its conclusions, so that assumptions reflect how trials actually run.

This is an applied research and implementation role at the intersection of data science, AI engineering, and biostatistics. The fellow will not be expected to invent new simulation methodology. Instead, they will design, build, and evaluate AI-assisted workflows that help statisticians and clinical development teams move from question to credible simulation results more efficiently — for example, agents that extract design assumptions from protocols and historical trials, benchmark those assumptions against internal and external data, draft simulation setups for statisticians to review, adjust, and approve, and summarize results for decision-makers.

The work emphasizes transparency, reproducibility, and human oversight: AI prepares and proposes, people curate, validate, and decide, so that AI accelerates the setup without obscuring the assumptions behind it. The ideal candidate is self-driven, works independently and takes initiative, and benefits from scientific guidance and a collaborative team environment.

As an employee of Boehringer Ingelheim, you will actively contribute to the discovery, development and delivery of our products to our patients and customers. Our global presence provides opportunity for all employees to collaborate internationally, offering visibility and opportunity to directly contribute to the companies´ success. We realize that our strength and competitive advantage lie with our people. We support our employees in a number of ways to foster a healthy working environment, meaningful work, mobility, networking and work-life balance.

Our competitive compensation and benefit programs reflect Boehringer Ingelheim´s high regard for our employees.

You will work with considerable autonomy and take ownership of your projects, with scientific guidance from your supervisor(s) and the broader team. Core responsibilities include:

• Design and build AI-agentic workflows (LLM-based agents, tool-calling pipelines) that support the trial simulation lifecycle end to end: assumption gathering, scenario setup, execution, and reporting.
• Develop approaches to ground simulation assumptions in reality by retrieving, extracting, and reconciling evidence from multimodal sources — internal trial data, operational metrics (enrollment, site performance, dropout, protocol deviations), protocols, publications, trial registries, and real-world data.
• Integrate AI workflows with existing statistical simulation tools and packages in R/Python, so that agents orchestrate validated statistical code rather than replace it.
• Build, test & assess scenario and "what-if" capabilities (site mix, visit schedules, monitoring intensity, enrichment approaches) that let cross-functional teams explore trade-offs quickly and translate results into decision support.
• Evaluate the reliability of AI-assisted workflows: accuracy of extracted assumptions, reproducibility of outputs, failure modes, and agreement with expert-built simulations. Establish human-in-the-loop checkpoints, audit trails, and guardrails appropriate for a regulated environment.
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