PhD Studentship in Computationally Intensive Statistics with application to Zoonoses
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Lancaster University, has a 3.5 year PhD studentship in Computationally Intensive Statistics part-funded by the National Centre for Zoonosis Research and part funded by the EPSRC. The studentship is available to UK students and pays fees plus a stipend for the full 3.5 year period. For a student starting in October 2008 the first year's stipend would be £14,940.
A zoonosis is a disease which is transmissible from animals to humans, and the project will involve the analysis of data from a 5 year study into the presence of cowpox, anaplasma, babesia, and bartonella in field voles in their natural habitat. Ecologists are particularly interested in the relationships between the diseases (e.g. does presence of disease A increase the probability of a subject contracting disease B) and in the robustness characteristics of individual field voles (e.g if a subject is relatively robust to disease A, is it also likely to be relatively robust to disease B).
The student will develop new methodologies based on Markov chain Monte Carlo, and then use them to answer the questions about zoonoses in which the ecologists are interested. The project will equip the student with expertise in computationally intensive methods which has a wide range of potential application, while being subject to the constructive discipline of finding practical answers to specific questions.
The department was rated 6* in the most recent RAE. It provides a thriving research environment, with over 25 PhD students within statistics. It runs an extensive range of postgraduate level courses, as well as being a founder member of the UK's Academy for PhD Training in Statistics (APTS). The department provides generously for PhD students, for example in terms of travel money for conferences, office space and through providing all PhD students with a departmental laptop for use during their PhD.
For detail of the research activities see
http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/department/research/statistics
For details of how to apply see
www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/department/opportunities/PhD/applying
For informal discussion contact the project supervisor, Dr Chris Sherlock <[log in to unmask]>
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