PhD Student positions in Disease Systems Biology

PhD Student positions in Disease Systems Biology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research

A number of PhD positions are available in the Translational Disease Systems Biology group at The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (CPR –www.cpr.ku.dk). The Center has been established at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, to promote basic and applied discovery research on human proteins of medical relevance. The Center comprises a wide range of expertise and resources including proteomics, protein production, bioinformatics and general characterization of disease mechanisms. The Programme for Disease Systems Biology consists of two research groups covering many systems level aspects of biology and medicine, including the integration of molecular-level data and healthcare data, for example laboratory test data and biomedical texts.

Responsibilities and tasks

The Translational Disease Systems Biology group led by Søren Brunak focuses on establishing early competitive advantage in disease-relevant computational analysis across the general areas of bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, systems biology and medical informatics. The PhD students will work on data-driven models of temporal disease development using a combination of molecular data and data from the healthcare sector, where the latter has the form of registry data or complete electronic patient records. These models will in part be descriptive and show how different diseases and diagnosis follow each other over long periods of time and in part predictive in the sense that longitudinal patterns of illnesses, medication and procedures will indicate future events. The models may be augmented by molecular level biomarker data from genomics or proteomics further increasing the predictive power. Prior knowledge of disease classification schemes and standard vocabularies will be an advantage.

Projected start date: Autumn 2015

Qualifications

The successful candidates will have strong qualifications or experience within several of the following areas:

• Bioinformatics and systems biology at the molecular level

• Medicine or pharmacology

• Knowledge of biomedical resources and infrastructures

• Healthcare data from registries and electronic patient records

• Competence in statistics and/or machine learning techniques

• Prior research experience with health care terminologies, schemes and ontologies, e.g. ICD9 and ICD10

The translational disease systems biology is highly multidisciplinary and collaborates with many other research groups nationally and internationally. Strong networking and team player skills are therefore preferred. As the candidate may run several projects in parallel, strong organizational skills and the ability to keep an overview are important.

Formal requirements

To be accepted for the positions, it is a condition that your Master of Science degree is considered to be equivalent to a Danish Master of Science.

It is a prerequisite that the PhD candidate is enrolled as a PhD student at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences according to the rules stipulated in the Ministerial order on the PhD programme at the universities (PhD order) from the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Higher Education and the guidelines for the PhD programme at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.

The monthly salary is around 25,500-30,800 DKK (around 3,400-4,100 €) plus 17.1 % in pension contribution.

Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

Deadline for application: 1 September 2015

Read more and apply here.