Applications are invited for a PhD Studentship at the University of Aberdeen:
Statistical approaches to epidemiological studies with misclassification, mismeasurement and other awkward features.
This will be supervised by Dr Gordon Prescott (University of Aberdeen) and Prof Paul Garthwaite (The Open University)
Studies of population health are limited by the quality of their data. Data that are cheap to obtain may be inaccurate and provide biased estimates of relationships between diseases and risk factors. We have previously demonstrated that supplementing a study with high quality data on a proportion of the people studied may reduce this bias. The most obvious application of these statistical methods is the improvement of questionnaire-based studies of population health, but they can be applied to any study with more than one potential source of information.
This 3.5 year studentship will extend previous work to address measured risk variables and more complex relationships. The student must: learn how to gather the appropriate medical record data for two studies; understand a variety of Bayesian and frequentist statistical approaches to the problems of misclassification and mismeasurement; become competent in a number of statistical techniques, packages and computer programming languages; develop new Bayesian statistical modelling approaches that extend current methods to permit correction for biases resulting from misclassification and mismeasurement while avoiding unrealistic assumptions; disseminate findings by producing academic publications and making programmes available for use by others.
Funding Notes: Funding is available at the UK/EU rate only.
Candidates should have (or expect to achieve) a First Class or 2.1 Honours degree (or equivalent) in a relevant subject such as mathematics or statistics or to have a degree in another subject and an MSc in statistics, medical statistics or similar.
References:
Prescott GJ and Garthwaite PH (2002) Biometrics 58(2):454-458.
Prescott GJ and Garthwaite PH (2005) Statistics in Medicine 24(3):379-401.
Prescott GJ and Garthwaite PH (2005) Statistics in Medicine 24(22):3463-3477.
The deadline for applications is 17 July 2009.
Please see this website for details about how to apply.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/clsm/graduateschool/prospective/phds.php
This is a re-advertisement and previous applicants need not reapply.
If you have difficulty with your application via this website please email Fiona Insch ([log in to unmask]).
Please contact Dr Gordon Prescott ([log in to unmask]) for further details about the content of the proposed PhD studentship.
The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013683.
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