ERA PerMed-Funded Post-doctoral Position

The Research Centre for Neurological Diseases Foundation offers a post-doctoral position at the Reina Sofia Foundation Alzheimer Centre in Madrid, Spain. This position is funded by the European grant initiative ERA-PerMed (Personalised Medicine). The project is coordinated by the University of Eastern Finland, with partnering institutions (in addition to our centre): Jena University Hospital, Germany, the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, and Alzheimer Europe, Luxembourg.

The project title is “Personalised aging pattern for early risk detection and prevention of cognitive impairment and dementia in cognitively healthy individuals (Pattern-Cog)”. Pattern-Cog aims to improve dementia prevention strategies by developing and validating a machine learning-based personalised medicine framework for detecting the earliest signs of impending cognitive decline, enabling early and personalised multi-domain interventions. Findings from multi-domain lifestyle trials have emphasized that intervention effectiveness may be dependent on a methodology that does not yet exist, i.e., the accurate identification of at-risk individuals who are most likely to benefit. Pattern-Cog will address this methodological gap by (1) developing methods for predicting future cognitive decline based on clinical, neuropsychological, MRI and biomarker data and distinguishing between healthy individuals at higher risk for mild cognitive impairment and dementia and those who remain healthy; and (2) testing the methodology in ongoing dementia prevention trials. Instead of a standard machine learning approach, we propose an innovative concept of personalised aging pattern rooted in data from healthy individuals.

Job description: The successful candidate will focus on objective 1, and leverage data from an ongoing longitudinal study of a large cohort of healthy 70-85 year olds, with particular emphasis on those individuals who later develop mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The successful candidate will work in a multi-disciplinary environment with full access to a 3T research-dedicated scanner. The position is for 2 years.