Senior New Areas 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 New Areas Researcher to help direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective interventions we can find. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale.

The New Areas team grantmaking is divided into three workstreams: i) our core cause areas: areas for which we devote a significant amount of time developing subject-matter specific expertise and networks, a thorough research agenda, and a large portfolio of grants (e.g., family planning, maternal and newborn health, tuberculosis and HIV); ii) our emerging cause areas: a broader set of cause areas for which the New Areas team is starting to build its expertise, networks and research agenda, and is making some initial grants (e.g., medical oxygen, applications of AI to global health); and iii) our incubators: supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator and Evidence Action’s Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future.

As a Senior New Areas 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 new areas. You'll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and hone 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 new areas 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:

Tackle thorny research questions in our existing portfolios. For example: to what extent could programs which distribute oral rehydration solution to reduce diarrheal deaths inadvertently induce exclusively breastfed children to consume poor quality water? How can we estimate the risk of reinfection after a child has completed a course of tuberculosis preventive treatment? How can we account for these concerns in our cost-effectiveness estimates?

Design and oversee learning grants. You'll help design impact evaluations for new and existing programs, and supervise researchers executing that work — from scoping the research question through to interpreting results and integrating them into our models.

Build our evidence base in new programmatic areas. This includes synthesising existing research, commissioning new reviews, and in some cases funding primary data collection — with the goal of determining whether a new intervention meets GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar and is ready for major grantmaking.

Provide research support to grantmakers. You'll ensure our cost-effectiveness models reflect our best current understanding of the programs we fund — stress-testing assumptions, incorporating new data, and flagging where uncertainty is high enough to warrant further investigation.

The Senior New Areas 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 ~70 people, and is currently organized into eight 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.

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.