Address
Form of work
SalaryResearch Fellow (Computational Biologist)
Grade UE07: £37,099 - £44,263 per annum
College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine - CGEM / IGC
Full-time: 35 hours per week
Fixed-term: for 24 months
We are currently recruiting a Research Fellow for this joint project collaboration. The selected candidate will be appointed for 2 years, during which time they will spend 12 months at LKCMedicine and 12 months at UoE. The fellow will be responsible for driving a project on the molecular epidemiology of brain health and dementia, under the joint supervision of the PIs from LKCMedicine and UoE (Max Lam and Riccardo Marioni).
The Opportunity
NTU Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) and University of Edinburgh (UoE) are leading research-intensive Institutes of Higher Learning. Both Universities have dynamic research environments with many areas of complementary and overlapping activity. In particular, the Universities have large scale population health research programmes, coupled to well-established health data platforms, and advanced techniques in genomics. This includes the SG100K study of 100,000 Asian individuals in Singapore (hosted by LKCMedicine) and the Generation Scotland study of 24,000 people in Scotland. The two Universities are therefore well positioned to collaborate on population and genomic research to address non-communicable disease, taking advantage of the insights generated from epidemiological studies that straddle ethnic groups.
Specifically, the focus area for the project is the molecular epidemiology of brain health and dementia. The appointed postdoc will work with multi-omics datasets from multi-ancestry populations to derive biomarkers of brain health for potential use in disease risk stratification. The brain health phenotypes under investigation include pen-and-paper cognitive tests, brain MRI scans, and clinical outcomes ascertained from electronic health records.
Key responsibilities include but not limited to:
Characterise the omics underpinnings of brain health using approaches such as GWAS, EWAS, variance components analyses. Triangulating evidence for putative causal associations across ancestries via Mendelian randomisation, colocalisation analyses etc. Determine the multi-omics contributions to incident dementia risk using time-to-event/survival models. Build and refine prediction pipelines for incident disease outcomes and complex traits.
Lead manuscript writing for publication in peer-reviewed journals.
Participate in seminars and work-in-progress meetings within the team and collaborators.
Provide guidance and mentorship to junior researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, occasional educational and or instructional activities.
Skills and knowledge:
A PhD in a related scientific area (e.g., Molecular Epidemiology/Biostatistics/Data Science).
Experience with R/Python and with Unix based platforms.
Knowledge of population genetics, statistics, bioinformatics or high dimensional data analysis.
Demonstrated in-depth knowledge, skills and expertise, with capability of leadership and achieving research excellence.
