You will join us as a post-doctoral researcher in the Disease Modelling and Health Care Evaluation and the Big Statistics sections. You will have responsibilities in, both, research (0.4-0.6 fte) and teaching (0.4 fte). In your research, you will focus on developing, evaluating, and applying multi-state survival models for colorectal cancer screening data. The general goal is finding colorectal cancers early in their biogenesis when they can often be treated successfully. To plan screening programs optimally, for example in terms of the frequency of screening, knowledge of the progression speed from early, treatable states, to more serious, later states is essential.
You will help to improve and evaluate a new Bayesian multi-state model (BayesTSM) that is used to estimate time-dependent transition probabilities between cancer (pre-)states and you will apply the model to national cohorts from The Netherlands and Italy. In doing so, the aim is improving existing screening protocols by personalised recommendations. This project requires both mathematical-statistical skills to help with the model development (e.g. Markov, multi-state or survival modelling), programming skills to implement ideas and conduct simulations, as well as interest in real-world applications. Your objective will be realising two top-tier scientific publications, one, in which you extend the existing BayesTSM model to allow for misclassification error in the screening test results and compare it to other methods, and one, in which you apply the model to screening data to obtain screening schedule recommendations.
The second part of the job will be teaching within the post-initial Master's program in Epidemiology (
epidm). Together with a colleague you will develop a new course 'Survival Modelling' focusing on topics such as Competing Risk and Multi-State Models. In addition, you will teach the (Dutch-language) courses Principles of Epidemiological Data Analysis (V20) and Regression Techniques (V30) and, depending on your expertise and area of interest, you teach elective courses of EpidM. Additionally, you will supervise students in their epidemiological research internship.