Senior Vaccination Researcher

GiveWell’s mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.

Summary

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Vaccination Researcher to help us direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective vaccination programs that we can find. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

Our vaccination grantmaking is focused on increasing coverage of routine immunization in children under the age of two in areas with high burden of vaccine-preventable disease. This has included supporting targeted outreach and mobile vaccination, demand-side incentives, and support for malaria vaccine rollout. In the future, we may expand into new areas such as campaigns, subsidizing vaccine procurement, supply chain support, surveillance and outbreak response, and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology. Vaccination is one of our fastest-growing areas, from $12 million in 2024 to $50 million in 2025 and more than $70 million expected in 2026.

As a Senior Vaccination Researcher, you’ll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell’s grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment.

We’re open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs.

The role

You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on vaccination. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and home in on those that matter most. You’ll also communicate externally about your work and mentor and advise other researchers on the team.

You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell vaccination team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment.

What you might work on in your first year:

• How should GiveWell’s portfolio of investments change in response to new technologies and shifts in government or funder resources and priorities?

• What are the most promising opportunities for grant-making in areas such as surveillance and outbreak response and R&D for vaccines or vaccine delivery technology? How should we prioritize those relative to current core areas?

• How can we improve our methods for evaluating the impact of programs on vaccination coverage? How can we collect more useful data and combine various sources of information to generate a holistic picture of which programs to expand and which to exit?

• What are the core differences between GiveWell's cost-effectiveness model and other vaccine cost-effectiveness models and what learnings from the external models should we apply to our model?

• What is the best design for a study to improve available estimates of the impact of key childhood vaccines on disease-specific mortality or all-cause mortality?

The Senior Vaccination Researcher will help shape a major annual grantmaking portfolio, own grant investigations end-to-end (from research question through grant recommendation), and represent GiveWell to external counterparts. You'll have significant latitude to propose new areas of work.

Team structure

Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into seven teams:

• Five of the teams (Livelihoods, Malaria, Nutrition, Vaccination, and Water) focus on specific areas of grantmaking.

• The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell.

• The Cross-Cutting team focuses on methodological issues, research quality, and other big-picture concerns that cut across all of our research work.

• The Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing.

There are currently four people on our vaccination team.

Team values

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values . We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.

• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.

• We don’t waste time. Once it’s clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.

• Lean research team = huge personal impact. In 2026, our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.

• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we’re able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

About you

We expect the Senior Vaccination Researcher to have

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics or related fields)

• Substantial professional experience in the vaccination landscape (broadly defined). This could include experience in epidemiological or health economics modeling, and/or in program implementation or funding.

We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

• GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.

• You’re abnormally curious—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate others’ work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work—you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.

• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.

• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.

• You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.

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