Clinical Trial Statistician - Research Assistant / Research Associate

Salary: Research Assistant: £36,532 – £41,299 per annum/Research Associate: £42,405 - £47,178 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance.

Job Description

This is an exciting new opportunity for a talented individual trained and experienced in sound statistical approaches and their communication to join our flourishing Nightingale-Saunders Clinical Trials and Epidemiology Unit (NSU) led by Professor Toby Prevost, a specialist unit of King’s Clinical Trial Unit (KCTU).

The reporting line is to Dr Francesca Fiorentino, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Trial Statistics. The NSU supports high quality trials of complex interventions and related studies primarily in nursing, midwifery, palliative care, rehabilitation and relevant heath care and clinical studies.

The postholder will be a graduate in mathematics/statistics (or other quantitative discipline), MSc (Research Assistant) or PhD (Research Associate), with strong programming skills and good attention to detail.

What will you be doing?

The appointee will contribute as the trial statistician to current and newly funded clinical trials. This will involve supporting studies to completion and publication, with senior trial statistician supervision. The appointee will have roles in the conduct, analysis and reporting stages of clinical trials, working with the senior statistician, as required by the King’s CTU Standard Operating Procedures for Clinical Trials.

This will include:

• development of statistical analysis plans,
• statistical contribution to ensuring a suitably designed database,
• statistical analyses to produce reports for presentation to independent data monitoring committees,
• final statistical analysis to produce trial results,
• a co-authorship role in contributing statistical results to final trial reports and publications.

Further design stage work will be required in supporting the senior statistician in the design of new trials.

This will include:

• Verification of the sample size calculation,
• Assisting with statistical requirements in grant applications and study protocols.

The trials are predominantly of complex interventions, led by researchers in the faculty. The appointee will undertake this role in a programme of randomised controlled trials in different disease areas, such as mental health, cancer prevention, rehabilitation and experimental medicine, and funded by main funders such as the National Institute for Health Research, the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. These are both feasibility and definitive trials.

In addition, the postholder will contribute to statistical consultancy and teaching as part of the faculty.

The post offers very good prospects for extension and personal development, as the current feasibility trials are parts of ongoing programmes and have the potential for subsequent larger effectiveness trials.

This post offers an opportunity to develop and apply a range of methodological skills to be put into practice in areas such as in the progression of feasibility trials to large trials, and the statistical choices around developing complex designs, interventions and outcome measures, as well as encouraging effective trial teamwork and communication. The Faculty offers fields of PhD study including in ‘Clinical Trial Statistics’, and the NSU within KCTU is co-ordinating the development of education materials relevant to clinical trials.

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