Ben J. Marafino, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and an Assistant Professor of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. He also holds an adjunct appointment in biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Marafino is a nationally recognized expert in clinical predictive modeling, with end-to-end experience developing, deploying, and evaluating AI/ML models in healthcare settings. He led the first large-scale application of causal machine learning in healthcare, as well as its first randomized evaluation. Among his contributions to care delivery research, Dr. Marafino designed and co-led KP-VACCINATE, the largest randomized trial ever conducted in a healthcare system. His work has won several awards, including the AcademyHealth Best of the Annual Research Meeting Award. His current research focuses on novel approaches to pragmatic trials, and on the development of large generative transformer foundation models pretrained on electronic health records.
Dr. Marafino also serves as a methodologist, lending his expertise in statistics, AI/ML, and informatics to other investigators at the Division of Research and The Permanente Medical Group. To date, he has supported over 40 investigators in this capacity and serves as a mentor to early-career researchers, including several K awardees. He received his PhD from Stanford University.
Current Positions
- Research Scientist, Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California
- Assistant Professor, Health Systems Science, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine
- Adjunct faculty, University of California, Berkeley
Section Affiliations
Primary Research Interests
- Clinical predictive modeling
- Pragmatic clinical trials
- Methods for observational studies, including quasi-experimental methods
- Natural language processing
- Transformer foundation models for electronic health records
