Senior Research Scientist; Maternal Health

Department: Professional Client Services

Location: Washington, DC

Compensation: $120,000 - $140,000 / year

Surgo Health is a Public Benefit Corporation building the world’s most comprehensive and insightful AI-powered data platform that reveals the why behind people’s behaviors. We uncover the unseen drivers of health - people’s beliefs, barriers, and behaviors - and transform that intelligence into scalable products that enable healthcare organizations to drive impact, reduce costs, and advance inclusion. From improving clinical trial design to optimizing care delivery and public health strategies, our solutions help decision‑makers act on what truly shapes health outcomes.

By revealing the human side of healthcare, we’re making it more personal, precise, and effective - for everyone.

As a Senior Research Scientist
, you will be the scientific engine driving the implementation of Surgo’s Maternal Health Taskforce project. Sitting at the intersection of research, data science, and behavioral science, you will take primary responsibility for executing the analytical work streams, managing day‑to‑day research delivery, and translating complex data into actionable insights that shape real‑world decisions across the US maternal health ecosystem.

You will lead hands‑on analytical work, designing methods, working directly with data, and generating high‑quality evidence, including insights derived from Surgo’s maternal vulnerability index, while coordinating closely with cross‑functional colleagues to ensure our outputs are rigorous, timely, and influence the broader maternal health ecosystem. This is a high‑impact, multi‑method program aimed at bringing together quantitative data with lived experience data and you will play a central role in turning evidence into meaningful change.

You'll thrive here if you:

• Love rolling up your sleeves and leading complex analyses to understand the why behind young people’s maternal health experiences.
• Bring a strong grasp of the US maternal health data landscape and an appetite to innovate with new methods and data sources.
• Enjoy bringing methodological rigor (across quantitative, qualitative, and AI‑driven approaches) to messy, multidimensional problems, and take pride in ensuring analyses, instruments, and insights are grounded in evidence and robust scientific practice.
• Get energy from working at the intersection of science and action, producing insights that partners can use immediately to drive change.
• Communicate clearly and confidently with both technical teams and non‑technical partners.
• Want to lead delivery within a fast‑moving, entrepreneurial environment where analytical creativity and rigor matter.

• Design and oversee the research strategy and analytical roadmap for the US Maternal Health Task Force (together with our advisory board), including survey research, narrative analysis, quantitative modelling, segmentation, and triangulation across data sources.
• Identify opportunities to advance the science, in particular leveraging natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), causal inference, and AI‑based methods for analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data.

• Conduct rigorous literature reviews and lead the development of behavioral‑science‑informed research instruments, using Surgo’s LLM‑powered tools combined with geospatial data.
• Lead high‑complexity analyses on maternal health, wellbeing, behavioral drivers, and system‑level factors affecting US pregnant people.
• Build and validate models for analyzing structured and unstructured data.
• Apply strong inferential and statistical reasoning to ensure our insights are scientifically sound and grounded in evidence across multiple datasets.
• Analyze data generated from conversational AI tools used with mothers (e.g., structured dialogues, open‑text responses, narrative prompts), ensuring rigorous methodological handling, bias assessment, and validity checks.

• Translate analytical outputs into crisp, actionable insights that funders, policymakers, and service…