IMPERIAL COLLEGE London
Research Associate, Computational Statistics in Population Genomics
£24,570 - £35,800 per annum
We are seeking a Research Associate to work in the Biostatistics group within the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the St Mary's campus, Paddington.
The post is funded by an EPSRC grant aimed at developing and applying computational statistics methods for exploiting the large new datasets that are now arising in population genomics. Recently, several promising new methods have arisen that replace calculation of the likelihood function by a simulation-based approximation, either in a rejection- or importance-sampling setting, or within Markov Chain Monte Carlo. This is especially useful when there are a lot of data and models that are complex yet easy to simulate from. This situation arises in population genomics, in which genome-wide datasets from humans and other organisms are now routinely being collected, and the simulations involve some or all of the demographic history of the underlying population. Some applications of the new methods have emerged in this field of application, and further improvements and extensions of the methodology are likely to quickly lead to important new research findings.
The post holder's main tasks will be to develop and test new statistical methods, guided by the project leader Professor David Balding, in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the St Mary's campus of Imperial College. S/he will also work closely with Dr Mark Beaumont, of the School of Animal and Microbial Sciences at the University of Reading, who is a collaborator on the project and is supervising a PhD student investigating novel applications of the methodology developed by the post holder. Currently the grant terminates on 28 February 2009, but we have funds for a further extension of several months and will apply for this.
You will have a PhD or equivalent research experience in Statistics or a related field.
An application form and job description, along with further details may be obtained from the following links:
Application form <http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/portal/page/portallive/0FDF9D28002543D0E0440003BACD13A5>
Job description <http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/39399698.DOC>
You can send your complete application to the HR Assistant, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, St Mary's campus, Medical School Building, London W2 1PG or by email to: [log in to unmask], quoting reference: SM048/08. For informal enquiries please contact David Balding [log in to unmask]
Closing date: 3 April 2008
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