MRC PhD studentship in Mental Health Informatics or Statistics

 

Enquiries ASAP to Professor Graham Dunn ([log in to unmask])

 

This studentship sits at the interface of two priority areas for research capacity building in the UK, Health Informatics and Mental Health.  It would be suitable for students from a number of different backgrounds, especially Statistics, Informatics or Mental Health. Irrespective of background, strong quantitative reasoning ability will be expected of the successful candidate.

 

For UK nationals, the studentship will cover tuition fees as well as provide an initial annual maintenance stipend of £12,500. It is anticipated that the project will commence in September 2006.

 

The studentship is also open to EU nationals but will only cover tuition fees. Applicants would need to be in a position to cover their own maintenance costs.

 

Project

Mental Health is arguably the most challenging of all clinical disciplines for Statisticians and Informaticians alike. At the root of this challenge lies the fact that the higher functioning of the human brain is complex, difficult to measure and interacts with many factors, including psychological measurement processes. The instruments used in Mental Health research are therefore usually multi-dimensional and prone to measurement error. It is not surprising, therefore, that the evidence base for Mental Health services is not well researched or used, when compared with the other major clinical domains. Despite the limitations of mental health measurement instruments, large improvements in the Mental Health evidence base could be achieved by applying current research methods systematically. PsyGrid aims to build the evidence base in first episode psychosis systematically by using e-Science methods. The effect of PsyGrid research could be large because psychotic disorders (mainly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) account for the bulk of mental illness treated by the NHS in general adult mental health services. These disorders are major public health challenges, with costs of health and social care in the UK of over £2 billion annually.

 

PsyGrid will form a research network, propagating systematic measurement and creating a large cohort of patients recruited as they present to specialist Mental Health services in their first episode of psychosis. Patients eligible to take part in clinical trials will be identified and recruited via PsyGrid.  Trials will be extended beyond their usual study period as enhanced, long-term follow-up measurement is the norm in PsyGrid. Observational research will be enhanced through standardisation of measurement and recording across a range of clinical sites, enabling more complex statistical analyses than might be feasible with less standardised data. 

 

The student project will concentrate on improving the generalisability of treatment effects, with long-term follow-up data and with meta-analysis across a 'super-cohort' of patients recruited through PsyGrid. PsyGrid is to provide the sampling frame for a number of intervention studies.  For most RCT's a variety of patient inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied or occur by happenstance, both prior to and during a trial. This can substantially reduce our ability to generalise as to the effects in the wider patient population, especially where the characteristics and size of the target population remain unknown.  In order to exploit the scope for greater generalisability of interventions set in the context of PsyGrid, methodology for a number of opportunities and associated problems needs to be addressed:

 

-                to be able to exploit the relationship among various `gold standard' outcome measures from intervention studies and the routine outcome measures of all patients in the target PsyGrid population.  

-                to use these routine outcome measures to better account for the drop-out of patients from intervention studies

-                to use these routine baseline and outcome measures to address issues concerning the selection of study participants

-                to consider how results from several intervention studies may be combined, from the application of routine meta-analysis to the consideration of the problem as one of sequential adaptive intervention that follows patients as they switch from treatment to treatment.

-                to consider the range of effect estimates that can be calculated in the context of PsyGrid, their interpretation and relative value.

-                to consider modifications to the design of interventions to enable more confident effect estimates to be obtained.

 

The potential methodological tools that could be exploited spans a wide range that includes weighted estimation equations, structural equation modelling, instrumental variable modelling and the use of structural mean and marginal structural models, and multiple imputation.

 

For more information on the PsyGrid project please see http://www.psygrid.org/

 

Supervision

The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by Professors Graham Dunn and Andrew Pickles, with the support of Dr Iain Buchan.

 

Graham Dunn leads the Biostatistics Group in the School of Epidemiology and Health Sciences at the University of Manchester.  Professor Dunn is an internationally renowned statistical expert in Mental Health trials and clinical measurement error. Andrew Pickles has an international in longitudinal studies, with applied interests in developmental psychopathology. He has played an important role in furthering latent variable modelling methods for non-normal data. Iain Buchan bridges Health Informatics and Public Health, and has a strong background in Medical Statistics. Dr Buchan is the Director of the Northwest Institute of Bio-Health Informatics.

 

Environment

The successful candidate will work within the Biostatistics Group but will also have close links with the Northwest Institute of Bio-Health Informatics.

 

Additional training and coursework

The University of Manchester runs a structured training programme for PhD students: http://www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/graduate%5Ftraining/

 

Subject-specific and generic research training: Courses are offered to meet generic research training needs such as thesis writing and library and information skills for research. Subject specific training is delivered through courses in disciplines of relevance to the student's research topic, typically in their home department, but also in departments in relevant neighbouring disciplines.

 

Transferable skills training: Courses are offered to meet transferable skills training needs such as career management skills, commercial exploitation of intellectual property, and written and oral communication skills.

 

Student selection and monitoring: PhD students are selected through open competition on the basis of their former education and experience, and through interview, and must satisfy the regulations for admission of the University of Manchester.  

 
Iain Buchan
Director & Senior Lecturer in Public Health Informatics
Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics
Stopford Building (Medical School)
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
MANCHESTER M13 9PT
UK
 
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 5160 (PA 1132)
Fax: +44 (0)161 275 5145
Mobile: +44 (0)7802 85 33 67
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www.nibhi.org.uk <http://www.nibhi.org.uk/>