PhD – Health Economics with a focus on Choices in Maternity Care – Romania

This position is part of HEPARD MSCA European funded doctoral network. The project is training early-stage researchers in advanced data analytics, causal inference and machine learning related to health policy topics. Specifically, it is training them to evaluate real-world policy impacts. Focusing on lifestyle interventions, family support and insurance systems, the project combines economics, public health and data science to produce evidence that reflects Europe’s diversity. It will help design fairer, more effective health policies for all.

Duties

Key objectives include:

• Examine migration’s impact on healthcare workforce distribution by comparing maternity care choices and utilization between native and migrant women in Romania. Model predictive factors and quantify costs of current and optimised distributions.
• Quantify healthcare costs of birth procedures in Romania (e.g., C-sections, natural births, length of stay, facility costs), focusing on Romania’s status as having the highest caesarean rate in Europe.
• Develop a model to analyse maternal health trends (e.g., mortality ratio, cause-specific deaths, risk factors) alongside healthcare access indicators (e.g., antenatal care coverage, skilled birth attendance, C-section rates).
• Study Tobacco Use During Pregnancy: Investigate the patterns of tobacco use among pregnant women, including the prevalence of electronic nicotine delivery systems and the socio-economic characteristics of women who drop out of smoking cessation trials.

This position includes a three-months research stay at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Requirements

• Master’s degree (120 ECTS) in Economics, Business, Engineering, Information Technology, Computational Science or related fields and very good programming skills;
• Must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Romania, for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately preceding the date of recruitment;
• Must have strong written and oral communication skills in English;
• Should be in the first four years of their research careers at the time of recruitment and have not been awarded a doctoral degree so far;
• Must be willing to reside in Romania for the entire 3-year appointment and to travel to other universities and partner organizations within the network for training activities and mobility periods.

Benefits