Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a key analytical role in the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit (CEU), Department of Public Health and Primary Care. The main role will be to conduct and disseminate high quality, high priority and applied research to further our understanding of the longer-term effects of Covid-19 using whole population electronic health records. Specific examples of these analyses include:

• characterising the sub-phenotypes of long-Covid using approaches to assess the frequency and clustering of symptoms, diagnoses and test results;
• identifying predisposing risk factors such as sociodemographic, lung function, cardiometabolic and mental health, and severity of initial Covid-19 illness;
• identifying determinants of recovery from long-Covid.

The UK's Chief Scientific Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, has established a COVID-19 National Core Studies (NCS) programme to conduct rapid, high priority, policy relevant research. The Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing NCS (LHW NCS), co-led by Professor Nishi Chaturvedi (UCL) and Professor Jonathan Sterne (University of Bristol), is coordinating a UK-wide team conducting analyses of population-based longitudinal studies linked to extremely large population-level datasets based on electronic health records (EHRs). These include OpenSAFELY and the new NHS Digital Trusted Research Environment Service for England, each of which includes linked data on more than 50 million people. The LHW NCS team was recently awarded £9.6m to study long COVID, in addition to other priority areas under investigation.

The postholder will join the expanding team working within the LHW NCS. They will work principally with Dr Angela Wood (Reader in Health Data Science, Cambridge) and in collaboration with other team members across the UK, in particular the University of Bristol, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London and University of Oxford to deliver this multi-institutional programme of research. They will also benefit from working in close conjunction with the senior epidemiologists and analysts in the CEU, including Professor John Danesh, Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio and Dr Adam Butterworth. The preferred candidate will have a PhD (or equivalent) in Statistics, Epidemiology, Health Data Science or other related quantitative subject or have equivalent experience. They will have a strong understanding of inferential and quantitative concepts and a broad range of quantitative techniques, strong computational skills and experience of analysing large epidemiological datasets, ideally with electronic health records. They should have an ability to communicate and present results to other quantitative scientists, bio-informaticians, epidemiologists, clinicians and scientists, along with excellent verbal and written communications skills and strong organisational skills.

Research Associate* - £32,816 - £40,322

Research Assistant - £26,715 - £30,942

https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/29225/