PhD position at Centre Recerca Matemàtica funded by the TOUCH COFUND project

14 Mar 2024
Job Information

Organisation/Company

Centre Recerca Matemàtica (CRM)

Research Field

Computer science

Researcher Profile

First Stage Researcher (R1)

Country

Spain

Application Deadline

30 Jun 2024 - 23:59 (Europe/Madrid)

Type of Contract

Temporary

Job Status

Full-time

Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

H2020 / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND

Reference Number

101126533

Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Offer Description

Topic: Mathematical modelling of disease trajectories across modalities

A PhD position is available at Diego Vidaurre’s research group at the Centre Recerca Matemàtica under the supervision of Diego Vidaurre (Computational Neuroscience) and Christopher Butler (Neurology). We are looking for a highly motivated candidate to investigate mathematical modelling of disease trajectories across modalities. A more personalised medicine is one of the major goals in society at present, and to provide better and more individualised attention, we need to characterise the heterogeneity of both the causes and the symptoms of diseases. Focusing on the brain, we need to acknowledge (i) that brain diseases are an admixture of different conditions due to comorbidities or an aggregation of different pathologies; and (ii) that brain pathology as a dynamic process, where subjects follow heterogeneous disease trajectories. In practice, we need statistical tools to bring these ideas from a theoretical concept to the application. To achieve a more integral understanding of brain disease, this project will develop a novel statistical framework to account for, and disentangle, the disparate sources of variability present in neural data. We have the following goals: (i) to leverage longitudinal data to define the different aspects of a disease as a dynamic process; (ii) to integrate across complementary data sets and preprocessing choices effectively; and (iii) to provide the capacity to relate the model parameters to genetic and environmental factors. Focusing on Alzheimer’s, we will apply our statistical framework to several public longitudinal data sets, including data from the Alzheimer Center Barcelona (ACE) in Barcelona.

The successful candidate will be enrolled in the Mathematics doctoral program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in the framework of the TOUCH project. TOUCH (“Towards the next generatiOn of excellent yoUng doctoral researchers on mental health by developing an intersectoral & transdisciplinary approaCH”) is a new excellent doctoral programme co-funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Actions of the European Commission and led by the UAB for the recruitment and training of 24 doctoral candidates in the field of mental health and wellbeing.

The group is currently supported by an ERC Starting Grant, a Novo Nordisk Emerging Investigator fellowship, a grant from the Independent Research Fund of Denmark and other sources of funding. We focus on the development of statistical and machine learning techniques for the analysis and modelling of neural data across different modalities, including functional and structural neuroimaging as well as electrophysiology. We primarily focus on human data, but we also hold collaborations with animal labs with the hope of finding a translation between animal models and the understanding of human disease. Our work is very collaborative, working closely together with neurologists and other neuroscientists in Barcelona, Oxford, London, Aarhus and Brussels.

We are looking for candidates with an excellent CV, ahigh degree of ambition and motivation, and with good personal qualities to work in our Team. We offer a 3-year full-time contract (37,5 hours/week) and a gross salary of 2.375 €/month (the salary will be the same for the 3 years).

The candidates must fulfil the following eligibility criteria from the EC: Mobility rule: candidates must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Spain for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately preceding the deadline for the programme call. Experience rule: researchers must be doctoral candidates at the date of recruitment, i.e. not already in possession of a doctoral degree at the deadline of the open calls. Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but have not yet formally awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible. Candidates must hold a degree that allows admission to the official doctoral programme at UAB.

Additional requirements for a stronger application are:

• We are looking for a graduate student with interest on computational neuroscience, data analysis, coding and statistics.
• The candidate will work on the development and application of novel machine learning approaches that use brain data to achieve a better stratification of existing diagnoses and clinical information.
• In particular, we will design models that can bring together the different modalities existing in various large-scale datasets, leveraging concepts that lie in between the supervised and unsupervised learning paradigms.

Interested applicants should apply through the TOUCH online platform by submitting a full CV, a motivation letter, two letters of recommendation and academic and English level certificates. The call will be open from the 1st of April to the 30th of June 2024. More information about the TOUCH project, the recruitment process, and the application platform are available on the TOUCH website .

 

Requirements

Research Field

Computer science

Education Level

Master Degree or equivalent

Languages

ENGLISH

Level

Excellent

Additional Information
Work Location(s)

Number of offers available

1

Company/Institute

Centre Recerca Matemàtica (CRM)

Country

Spain

Geofield

Where to apply

Website

https://webs.uab.cat/touch/

Contact

State/Province

Barcelona

City

Cerdanyola del Vallés

Website

https://www.crm.cat/

Street

Campus UAB

Postal Code

08193

E-Mail

[email protected]

STATUS: EXPIRED