Principal Scientist, Health Care - Scientific and Clinical Affairs

About The Opportunity

At Medifast, our team members are relentless in our mission of driving Lifelong Transformation, Making a Healthy Lifestyle Second Nature™. When you join Medifast, you become part of a dynamic, fast-growing community of highly motivated, like-hearted people who share a passion for promoting health and wellness. Just as OPTAVIA Coaches inspire Clients to reach their personal wellness goals, at Medifast, we inspire each other to bring our best to work each day to further our shared mission. If you want to build a rewarding career that makes lives better on a daily basis, Medifast may be the perfect place for you.

Overview Of Position

The Principal Scientist, Health Care Data Sciences, will serve as subject matter expert in obesity and related co-morbidities clinical care, health outcomes research, data sciences and health care policy. This role will help advance our medically supported weight loss programs by contributing to development of real-world evidence-based research programs, evidence based clinical care protocols, programs, plans and products. Responsibilities include driving education, training, communication, and benefit messaging to highlight the company’s medical heritage, scientifically validate the Medifast and OPTAVIA brands, and support both Coaches and Clients effectively. This role will help evaluate existing scientific evidence, internal data and contribute to data-driven decisions to support innovation of our Program, Plans and Products, and health and wellbeing of our Coaches and Clients.  The successful candidate will also help create and substantiate company claims through in-house and third-party research and will guide the development of scientific initiatives that advance innovation of programs, plans and products, and contributes to externalization of our science. The research work produced by this position will help support the company’s marketing and public relations positioning, claims, product differentiation, and bolster the scientific credibility of OPTAVIA offerings. This will be a strategic role interfacing with key health care professionals, subject matter experts, and other external partners and will help define long-term focus areas for Medifast in the obesity and related co-morbidities clinical care and policy space. This role may also require the management of the Scientific Advisory Board, help develop research strategy and work cross-functionally to co-lead and deliver across the medically supported weight loss program and other future business initiatives.

II. Job Responsibilities

1. Subject matter expert in the obesity and related co-morbidities clinical care processes, including medical, pharmaceutical, nutrition, behavior and lifestyle modification.
2. Maintain robust knowledge of pharmaceutical interventions in obesity clinical care and identify opportunities for OPTAVIA.
3. Subject matter expertise in data science, including scientific methods, biostatistics, machine learning, data systems, processing, and visualization with proficiency in R, Python, and SQL to enable the extraction of actionable insights from data. 
4. Develop relevant real-world evidence-based, health economics and clinical research programs and related data analytics to demonstrate efficacy of OPTAVIA programs, plans and products in conjunction with medically supported weight loss programs. This includes contributing to the dissemination of findings through scientific publications, ensuring the research aligns with rigorous academic and industry standards to enhance credibility and support evidence-based practices.
5. Contributes to the development of clinical care protocols, health care policy strategy for nutrition and lifestyle programs as part of medically supported weight loss programs.
6. Develops and manages research partnerships with academia, thought leaders, health care and other external partners to support medically supported weight loss.  Provides input and support for Medifast’s research, including the development of study design and protocol(s).
7. Identifies, and manages Key Opinion Leaders within academia, health care and other external partners to support medically supported weight loss initiatives.
8. Provides evidence-based recommendations for OPTAVIA programs, plans, and product innovation to support medically supported weight loss.  This may entail reviewing new ingredients, technologies, developing and substantiating benefit messaging, identifying gaps in the evidence and opportunities to conduct research, communicating the science and benefits, while working cross-functionally with marketing, PR, R&D, legal, field operations and other internal and external partners.
9. Collaborates with nutrition support, nutrition and wellness, medical safety and surveillance, R&D (produc