Rainer Hilscher

Rainer Hilscher, PhD, is a senior research data scientist and project director at RTI with expertise in simulation modeling (chronic diseases, alcohol abuse, soft targets), generative AI, knowledge representation, and data science projects. He has supported investigations in collaboration with multiple federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Currently, Dr. Hilscher is the principal investigator on a CDC-funded diabetes and social determinants of health (SDOH) micro-simulation project, as well as a CDC-funded addition to the comprehensive diabetes micro-simulation project. He is also the lead modeler on a multiple chronic diseases SDOH micro-simulation project and a DHS Office for Bombing Prevention (OBP)-sponsored agent-based modeling project that is examining soft target security and prevention. In addition, Dr. Hilscher applies generative AI to the extraction of information from scientific articles for an NIH-funded project. 

Before joining RTI, Dr. Hilscher worked at the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan on disentangling the neighborhood effect from self-selection in the context of health disparities. He also worked at Altarum Institute and a boutique consultancy where he applied computational modeling to various domains—ranging from behavioral prediction in military contexts to modeling issues in public health using methods from complexity science.