WOC - Research Statistician

Full Job Description

Please note: There is no pay associated with this position. This position serves as Without Compensation (WOC) Research Statistician within the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The VA Research Program strives to promote Veteran-centered care to improve patient experiences and outcomes across VA healthcare and community settings, and to advance value-driven care by providing Veterans the highest quality care at the lowest financial burden.

To qualify for this position, applicants must meet all requirements by the closing date of this announcement, 04/06/2026.

You may qualify based on your experience as described below: Experience: You must possess (1) Demonstrated experience extracting, managing, and preparing large clinical or administrative datasets, utilizing SQL, R, SAS, and Python to build, clean, validate, and maintain reproducible research datasets; (2) Advanced statistical and analytical expertise, including causal inference methods (propensity score techniques, regression modeling) and development and validation of predictive models for clinical or operational outcomes; and (3) Experience delivering clear, decision-ready findings by producing visualizations, reports, and presentations that effectively communicate analytical results to diverse stakeholders.

AND, Education: Degree: that included 15 semester hours in statistics (or in mathematics and statistics, provided at least 6 semester hours were in statistics), and 9 additional semester hours in one or more of the following: physical or biological sciences, medicine, education, or engineering; or in the social sciences including demography, history, economics, social welfare, geography, international relations, social or cultural anthropology, health sociology, political science, public administration, psychology, etc.

Credit toward meeting statistical course requirements should be given for courses in which 50 percent of the course content appears to be statistical methods, e.g., courses that included studies in research methods in psychology or economics such as tests and measurements or business cycles, or courses in methods of processing mass statistical data such as tabulating methods or electronic data processing.

OR Combination of education and experience -- courses as shown above, plus appropriate experience or additional education.

The experience should have included a full range of professional statistical work such as (a) sampling, (b) collecting, computing, and analyzing statistical data, and (c) applying statistical techniques such as measurement of central tendency, dispersion, skewness, sampling error, simple and multiple correlation, analysis of variance, and tests of significance.

You will be rated on the following Competencies for this position: Mathematical Reasoning Creative Thinking Research Technical Competence Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religions; spiritual; community; student; social).

Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment.

You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience. Note: A full year of work is considered to be 35-40 hours of work per week.

Part-time experience will be credited on the basis of time actually spent in appropriate activities.

Applicants wishing to receive credit for such experience must indicate clearly the nature of their duties and responsibilities in each position and the number of hours a week spent in such employment.

Physical Requirements: The work is predominantly sedentary. Typically, the employee sits comfortably to do the work.

However, there will be some walking, standing, bending and carrying of items of moderate weight such as large binders, banker style file boxes, meeting materials, papers, books or small parts.

Hand and eye coordination for delicate testing procedures may be the only special physical demand required to perform the work. Major Duties:

The Research Statistician serves as a key contributor to VA-supported research by providing advanced statistical expertise for clinical, epidemiological, and health services studies.

This role supports Principal Investigators (PIs) by ensuring rigorous study design, high-quality data analysis, and compliance with VA data and research standards.

There is no pay associated with this position.

Major Duties: Extract and manage data from electronic health record and administrative systems using SQL Develop and maintain accurate and complete research datasets Clean datasets and address missing data, outliers, and inconsistencies Standardize datasets and document all data transformations Apply advanced statistical methods using R and SAS Conduct causal inference analyses, including propensity scoring and regression models Develop and validate predictive models for clinical outcomes Create reports, dashboards, and data visualizations for diverse audiences Collaborate with research teams to define variables, methods, and analytic approaches Ensure compliance with data security standards and maintain PHI/PII integrity Utilize R, SAS, SQL, and Python to automate workflows and support reproducible research Work Schedule: Intermittent (Without Compensation)