PhD Position in Developing a Federated Metadata Repository for Clinical Data

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern Denmark for the Computational Biology group chaired by Associate Professor Richard Röttger and Novo Nordisk jointly invite applications for a PhD position for the creation of a federated metadata repository for sensitive clinical data to be filled as soon as possible.

A large roadblock of medical research is the difficult access to sensitive data which therefore hinders the training of complex and powerful machine learning concepts. This iss ue is amplified when considering rare diseases with low incidence numbers per hospital. In order to enable the identification of suitable patients for clinical studies amenable to machine learning, a privacy-preserving metadata repository is required. Here, the actual patient data remains at the site of storage, but virtual cohorts can be identified according to clinical phenotypes, symptoms, or diagnoses. Crucially, the data must remain at the site of storage and must not leave the site, not even in anonymized form.

Therefore, the main task of the successful candidate will be the development and establishment of such a system, including user-friendly front-end and the required back-end. The central idea should be the storage and organization of pre-computed aggregate statistics of the connected and the support of on-the-fly queries to the storage sites to answer new queries to the metadata repository. The envisioned system should be developed following industry best pr actices in terms of code flexibility, reusability, and deployment in containerized form.

The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by the University of Southern Denmark and Novo Nordisk. The candidate will gather research as well as industrial experience through the close collaboration between SDU and Novo Nordisk. The candidate will spend time at both facilities and ensure that the ongoing research maximizes utility and impact due to its clinical and practical relevance. We also provide the candidate with direct access to state-of-the-art computing facilities optimized for deep learning and distributed computing.

We are seeking outstanding candidates with strong analytical and problem solving skills, who are strong in written and oral communication (in English), and have documented experience in the development of complex compute systems. The applicant should have provable skills in the state-of-the-art web-development frameworks, virtualization t echnique s as well as database technologies. Expertise in clinical data science and machine learning, as well as computer security and data privacy are welcome.

Deadline
15 February 2022.

Please see the full call, including how to apply, on http://www.sdu.dk ">www.sdu.dk .