Project Assistant

The Role:

A Project Assistant position to coordinate the administrative and communication activities of the EarlyCause European research project, offered at University of Barcelona as part of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine lab (BCN-AIM). The Project Assistant will generally provide the ‘back office’ services required for successful project coordination and will support the Project Coordinator and Team Members in the overall coordination and management of the projects.

Tasks performed by the Project Assistant include, but are not limited to:

• Track all project related costs in collaboration with the UB Research Service (Fundació Bosch i Gimpera).
• Manage recruitment processes of postdocs, technicians and students for the lab.
• Manage purchases, reimbursements and project related travels.
• Engage in communication tasks related to the BCN-AIM group and the EU project. This includes content generation, as well as the management of social media and online channels.
• Support the BCN-AIM team members in their day-to-day communication, management and administrative activities.
• Help organise EU projects related meeting, workshops and other events.

The Group

The successful candidate will join the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab (www.bcn-aim.org ), which is an integral part of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. It is a young and dynamic research lab, highly active in international projects, and composed of >20 enthusiastic academics, researchers, students and research managers, with expertise in data science, machine/deep learning, biomedical informatics, biomedical ethics, and health-related applications. The research team has an established track record in coordination and participation in national, European and international projects in biomedical data science and medical AI (e.g. EuCanImage, euCanSHare, EarlyCause, LongITools, RadioVal, DataTools4Heart, Youth-GEMs, HealthyCloud, AIMIX).

The Project:

The EarlyCause H2020 project will leverage a unique collection of birth cohorts, longitudinal data and experimental models to identify causative mechanisms linking early life adversity (in children and pregnant women) to multi-morbidity development. Concretely, the project will focus on depression and two of its main physical comorbidities, namely coronary heart disease and diabetes. The consortium will disentangle the complex biological contributions from four key interconnected domains linked to ELS, namely epigenetics, inflammation, neuroendocrine system, and microbiome. Furthermore, modifying effects of environmental factors such as sex/gender, socioeconomics, lifestyle and behaviour will be quantified, thus uncovering potential intervention targets that may reverse the causative mechanisms and reduce the impact of ELS on multi-morbidity development in high-risk individuals.

To achieve the goals of the project, this highly multi-disciplinary and experienced consortium will combine state-of-the-art and novel approaches from basic, pre-clinical and clinical research, including advanced statistical and mathematical methods, animal models of prenatal and postnatal stress, cellular models in various tissues, and integrative bioinformatics and machine learning methods. The consortium members will also enable access and exploitation of the largest set of European cohorts, comprising rich information on early stressors, biological and omics data, as well as depressive, cardiovascular and metabolic clinical outcomes.

The Institution:

The University of Barcelona (UB), founded in 1450, is one of the oldest universities in Spain. It comprises a student body of 84,370 and 4,548 research staff members. With 73 undergraduate programs, 273 graduate programs and 48 doctorate programs, UB is the largest university in Barcelona and Catalonia. The UB is ranked the first Spanish university according to several rankings (QS World University Rankings 2018, ARWU/Shanghai Ranking 2018). It is particularly interested in fostering international relations and, for many years, has managed an average of 150 European projects per year. Since January 2010, Universitat de Barcelona is part of the prestigious League of European Universities Research (LERU).

Acronym

EarlyCause

FBG project number

402158

Project title

Causative mechanisms & integrative models linking early-life-stress to psycho-cardio-metabolic multimorbidity

IP

Karim Lekadir

Department

Facultat de Matemàtiques i Informàtica

Gross salary per year

€35.000 – €40.000 (depending on experience)

Required documents

Application letter, Curriculum vitae

Send your application to:

email

[email protected]

Name

Xènia Puig

email subject

Project Assistant application