Research Fellow / Senior Research Fellow

About us

The UCL Division of Psychiatry, located within the Faculty of Brain Sciences, is a world-renowned centre of excellence in mental health research. Our mission is to improve mental health through cutting-edge research and education. By leveraging insights from basic science, we address clinical problems to improve patient outcomes and public health. Moreover, we take pride in delivering innovative teaching directly relevant to clinical practice and informed by our research. Join our team and help us drive forward the field of mental health research and education.

The post will also work closely with colleagues in the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) at UCL —a multidisciplinary research centre which leads four of Britain's internationally renowned cohort studies. CLS sits within the Social Research Institute, an international centre of excellence for policy-oriented social science, and IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. This research! is a col laboration between the UCL Division of Psychiatry, The Institute of Behavioural Genetics in Boulder, Colorado (Prof Matt Keller), and The MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol (Prof Gibran Hemani).

The post holder will work with an international team of researchers from various backgrounds using genetic data to learn about population health. As such, this post is open to multiple disciplinary backgrounds, and training will be provided where required. The post holder will work on two complementary research strands:

• Using genetic data measured in parents and offspring to help disentangle the causes of parent-offspring similarity in traits. We will deploy these new and existing models in three large, international cohort studies to (a) elucidate which parental traits influence anxiety, depressive, and attentional symptoms in offspring and (b) better understand how parental psychiatric illness influences their offspring’s social, physical, and mental well-being.
• Investigating disparities in health according to socioeconomic position, cognitive ability, and underlying genetic liability. This collaboration is with David Bann and the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) colleagues. The project will use birth cohort studies with genetic and survey data (1946, 1958, 1970, and new data from the recently genotyped Millennium Cohort Study, including trios).

About the role

The post holder will undertake quantitative research using large-scale population level datasets. They will plan and execute analyses and lead the interpretation, write-up, and dissemination of results for communication to public health, educational, and clinical audiences.

The appointment is available immediately and is funded for two years in the first instance.

About you

You will have an PhD in a relevant discipline (e.g., epidemiology, genetics, genetic epidemiology, psychology, medical statistics, statistics, data science, econometrics, health informatics or similar), with a keen interest in applications on complex statistical, prediction and computational models to the analysis of large data sets. You are comfortable using statistical software tools and potentially have some experience running applications in large computer clusters and coding in bash.

Please click on ‘Apply’ to see the full job advert, job description and person specification.

The advert may close early (from 06/10/2023) if we receive a high volume of applications.

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