Interested in working on disease outbreaks, modelling the spread of disease and R package development? Have a look at the new position which has just opened at Imperial College London.
Deadline for applications is 24th February 2017. Questions can be sent by email to Pierre Nouvellet or Anne Cori
Find below an excerpt of the job description:
In our increasingly interconnected world, it is crucial to understand the risk of an outbreak originating in one country/region and then spreading to the rest of the world. Early detection of infectious disease outbreaks has the potential to limit the size of an outbreak and prevent an outbreak from becoming a pandemic. While gathering reliable, accurate, and timely data is critical, it is just the first step in the disease surveillance process. Compiling the data, conducting analysis, and generating actionable reports are equally important: only well informed decision makers can effectively react.
To address these issues, the project will use the example of Ebola to develop a general automated framework to estimate and visualize the risk of exportation of an outbreak event from one country to another in real time.
The post-holder will take a leading role in developing a statistical framework to link surveillance data with other data sources and produce spatially explicit estimates of risk of outbreak spread. The statistical framework will then be tested and validated against historical data. The workflow will be implemented in an open-source, modular package which in the long run will be used for real-time analyses to inform stake-holders and policy makers.
The post-holder will be expected to work in close collaboration with project partners from ProMed, Healthsites.io and HealthMap to inform the data needs required for the development of risk indicators, and the production of user-friendly maps conveying the necessary information.
We believe that this is a unique opportunity for the post-holder to not only develop and improve their skills in statistical modelling of infectious diseases, but also work at the interface between fundamental research, public health and policy-making.
It is essential that you have a PhD or equivalent, in one of the following areas: statistics, infectious disease epidemiology, population biology, bioinformatics, physics, or computer sciences.
The successful candidate will be members of both the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling and the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, and will be based at the St Mary’s Campus, Paddington.
The post is available now full time for a fixed duration of 18 months in the first instance, with a potential extension until March 2019.
See the official job ad on Imperial College’s website.