Experience

My path has moved from academic research on how people make decisions to building the tools and systems that help organizations act on their data. Across academia, Big Pharma, healthtech startups, and healthcare consulting, the thread has stayed constant: reduce complexity, surface what matters, and make it easy for people to act with confidence.

Career

Selected highlights — for the full picture, see my resume.

Download Resume

Nathaniel D. Phillips, PhD

Jul 2025 – Present

Portland, OR

Available for new engagements

Data and Decision Science Consultant

Self-Employed

Available for engagements in data science infrastructure, decision support, and training — for health-tech startups, clinical teams, and research organizations.

Jan – Jun 2025

New York, NY

Mental health at scale

Staff Quantitative Scientist

Talkiatry

Built predictive models and analytics infrastructure for one of the fastest-growing psychiatric care platforms in the US.

2022 – 2024

Brooklyn, NY

Founded & led

CTO & Co-Founder

Plinth Analytics

Co-founded a healthcare analytics consultancy. Led technical delivery across RWE, decision tools, and data infrastructure projects for pharma and health technology clients.

2020 – 2022

New York, NY

Oncology RWE

Senior Quantitative Scientist

Flatiron Health

Designed and executed real-world evidence studies using structured oncology EHR data. Designed and led development of tools to reduce scientific implementation time by >90%.

2018 – 2020

Basel, Switzerland

Big Pharma

Senior Data Scientist

Roche

Developed quantitative methods and decision frameworks to support internal decision making at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

2016 – 2018

Basel, Switzerland

Decision science research

Post-Doctoral Researcher

University of Basel

Taught programming and research methods at the University of Basel. Co-led a data science bootcamp for professionals in pharma and finance.

2014 – 2016

Konstanz, Germany

Heuristics & judgment

Post-Doctoral Researcher

University of Konstanz

Studied how simple decision heuristics outperform complex models in noisy, real-world environments. Developed the FFTrees R package — now published, cited over 100 times, and used by researchers worldwide.