Research Associate in Computational Epidemiology

Location: St Mary’s Campus (Paddington)

Job Summary

This job is an opportunity to join the School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College, and work within the multidisciplinary Computational Epidemiology group of Prof M Chadeau-Hyam and work on the MRC-funded project PRISM in collaboration with the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).

This is an exciting and innovative project that combines statistics, machine learning, environmental and social sciences as well as molecular medicine to investigate molecular markers of asthma severity and response to personalised treatments. The work aims at defining molecular signatures of asthma subtypes and asthma severity and to investigate if and to what extent, these signatures are affected by personalised treatments. This work will be done under the direct supervision of Prof M Chadeau-Hyam and Dr Dragana Vuckovic, leading the statistical workpackage of the project.

You will report to Prof M Chadeau-Hyam, will have the opportunity to contribute to other large-scale international projects involving the group and will have the opportunity to contribute to teaching and supervision of MSc students from the Health Data analytics and Machine Learning programme.

Duties and responsibilities

You will be responsible for the development of advanced statistical models and machine learning algorithms to identify (i) molecular (multi-omic) signatures of asthma subtypes and severity, (ii) signature of the response to personalised treatments. Resulting statistical models should also facilitate the identification of mechanisms involved in the development and control of asthma in treated patients.

Essential requirements

You should have a PhD in statistics, epidemiology or any related discipline.

Constructing and applying statistical models using OMICs data, biochemistry and social factors in the life course in a longitudinal set up and investigate their effect on health and ageing:

• Preparation of bespoke scripts
• Integrating omics and other data in the lifecourse
• Biologically interpret results.

Successful applicants will have:

• Familiarity with omics data analyses, including pre-processing algorithms, development of ad-hoc models accounting for technically–induced variation (e.g. laboratory artefacts)
• Experience in using multivariate models to screen in high-dimensional data
• Experience in omic data integration
• Strong programming skills (R, Python) for the preparation of bespoke scripts to analyse and integrate full-resolution omics datasets, including computational skills to optimize and ensure scalability of the resulting models
• Experience in interpreting results from the analysis of OMICs data (e.g. genomics, epigenomics) using relevant software and visualisation tools
• capacity to develop and implement novel approaches/strategies to investigate how data arising from several omics platforms

Further Information

This is a full time, fixed term position for 15 months. You will be based at St Mary’s Campus, Paddington.

Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as a Research Assistant within the salary range £38,194 - £41,388 per annum.

Should you require any further details on the role please contact: Prof. Marc Chadeau-Hyam – m.chadeau@imperial.ac.uk

To apply, visit www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs and search by the job reference MED03626.

Closing date: 13 March 2023

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