Senior Malaria 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.The role You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on malaria. You’ll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and honing 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 malaria 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. In the course of your work, you might approach questions like these: How should GiveWell’s portfolio of investments change in response to new technologies and shifts in government or funder priorities? How does expanding the use of newly-developed insecticides in nets affect cost-effectiveness?  What is the potential cost-effectiveness of novel interventions such as attractive toxic sugar baits at scale across contexts?  Team structure Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into seven teams: Five of the teams (Water, Livelihoods, Nutrition, Malaria, and Vaccines) 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. Our malaria team has three subteams: two of them focus on grantmaking in vector control and chemoprevention, respectively, and the third is focused on cross-team research questions. You might sit on any of the three teams. 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. ...