Department of Public Health and Primary Care
Fully Funded PhD Studentship (Home Fees)
Supervisor: Professor Angela Wood (Professor of Biostatistics and Health Data Science)
Start date: January 2027 (or earlier)
We are offering an exciting fully funded PhD studentship at the University of Cambridge, embedded within Cancer Data Driven Detection (CD3) - a major £10 million national research programme bringing together leading experts in cancer epidemiology, biostatistics, artificial intelligence, and health data science.
THE PROJECT: Early cancer diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for patients with vague or non-specific symptoms. Electronic health records provide unprecedented opportunities to develop personalised cancer risk prediction models, but missing and incomplete symptom data can introduce bias and worsen existing inequalities.
This PhD will develop innovative statistical and machine learning approaches to understand, model, and overcome missing data in large-scale healthcare datasets. The student will investigate how data completeness varies by patient and healthcare setting, evaluate its impact on cancer risk prediction, and develop new methods to produce more accurate, equitable, and clinically useful models.
The project offers opportunities to work with large linked electronic health records, advanced statistical methods, simulation studies, and reproducible open-source software development...