We seek an independent researcher in the field of Data science / Statistics enthusiastic about health care innovations! Are you the scientist who can strengthen our multidisciplinary section HTSR (Health Technology and Services Research)?

Assistant Professor Optimizing health care by statistical modelling

Data science is becoming more and more relevant in a growing number of scientific fields including health care. This is especially due to the exponential growth in size of available data sets. Increasingly heterogeneous data is available, such as patient characteristics, clinical measurements, images, text data, sensor data, daily experiences and patient preferences. The impact and value of this data may also increase, depending among others on the availability of knowledge to use the data to build appropriate statistical models that are valid, explainable and trustful.

The section HTSR conducts research on the impact of innovations on clinical and health outcomes, delivery of health services and associated health care costs and measuring patient preferences. It consists of a multi-disciplinary team of health economists, statisticians, data scientists, epidemiologists and health scientists. It has collaborations with academic hospitals throughout the Netherlands and with hospitals in the region such as ZGT (Almelo / Hengelo), MST (Enschede), Rijnstate (Arnhem), Deventer hospital and Isala (Zwolle) and organizations such as IKNL (hosting the Dutch Cancer Registry). From these partners there is a growing interest to optimize clinical decision making, for example using prediction tools based on statistical models developed on (regional) patient data. We teach data science and statistics, epidemiology, HTA, and health economics in, among others, health and biomedical bachelor and master programs, such as Health Sciences and Technical Medicine.

Due to growing teaching and research activities we seek to expand our team with a data scientist or statistician. The focus of this position is on developing statistical and /or machine learning models based on individual patient data to optimize the decision-making process.

We offer a position as assistant professor where you have the opportunity to express creativity in solving challenging data science problems, the flexibility to choose own application areas, medical domain and innovations to focus your research on, and to collaborate with experts from other groups within the university, such as mathematicians, behavioral scientists, AI-experts and technicians.

Responsibilities

You contribute to teaching (50-70%) and research (30-50%) and will be responsible for :

• Research: contributing to further developing the statistics / data science research line within HTSR. Key activities are co-acquisition and co-execution of research projects, producing high quality journal publications, and securing (inter)national scholarly visibility;
• Education: teaching (bio)statistics and / or data science at different levels; supervising BSc and MSc thesis projects;
• Valorization: engaging with partners, such as hospitals, policy makers, municipalities, insurers, care professionals, patients, and citizens, to identify challenges, questions, and implementation of developed models into for example decision tools.
• Organization: supporting HTSR activities and committees within the TPS department, the TechMed Center and BMS Faculty.

A highly motivated and qualified academic, who has an ambition to combine innovative educational activities and ground-breaking research with data science for clinical decision making. Driven to work with care providers, patients, engineers, social scientists, societal partners, policy makers and industry to address real-world challenges in healthcare. Educating the health- and social scientists, and engineers, of the future.

Criteria for success:

• A relevant PhD degree (for example in (bio)statistics, mathematics, data science, computer science, psychometrics, econometrics, machine learning);
• In-depth knowledge, skills and experience of data science, in particular (bio)statistics, statistical learning;
• A track record in interdisciplinary collaboration, able to bridge engineering science and social science in the context of health;
• Proven proficiency with statistical programming languages (e.g. R, Python);
• High quality research as validated by publications in peer-reviewed journals. Evidence of communicating modelling results to a broad audience of non-experts, and examples of their use in actual decision making in healthcare;
• Possession of a University Teaching Qualification (UTQ) certificate, or willingness to acquire the latter, with the ambition to become a creative and effective teacher;
• International research experience is considered an advantage, as is knowledge of the Dutch language, and experience in acquiring grants.
• Very good communication and presentation skills, and an excellent command of English, at least at C2 level.

You will be appointed for 1 year, after which the position can become permanent, subject to a successful evaluation. By starting your career at UT, you can develop as an internationally acknowledged and recognized academic. An employment at the UT entitles you to:

• The starting salary ranges between € 3.821 to € 5.943 gross per month based on your experience;
• Generous social security package, including minimum of 29 holidays per year; a holiday allowance of 8% of the gross annual salary; a year-end bonus of 8.3%; a confirmed pension scheme and possibilities to save up for a sabbatical leave;
• Professional and personal improvement programs, including mentoring; the UT also provides support with preparing VENI/VIDI and ERC proposals.

UT offers an attractive benefits package, including a reduced rate for health insurance and access to sports facilities at work.

The Department of Technology, Policy and Society (TPS) at the University of Twente (UT) constitutes a multidisciplinary department in the BMS Faculty. Our five groups explore and assess how new technologies and innovation affect our societies, institutions and daily lives, and vice versa. We help to craft responsible and sustainable solutions. HTSR (https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/htsr/) is one of the five TPS sections.