PhD candidate in Clinical Data Science focusing on the automation of data extraction pipelines and FAIR data infrastructures

Maastricht University has a vacancy for a PhD student at the faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences and specifically at the Clinical Data Science research department of the radiotherapy department MAASTRO clinic.

At the Clinical Data Science group, we work on three main research areas: building global data sharing infrastructures; applying machine learning to build models from these data; and, using these models to improve healthcare.

The PhD position is embedded in the AIDAVA project “AI-powered DAta curation & publishing Virtual Assistant”. AIDAVA is a project funded by the European Commission with the involvement of different University medical centres and patient organisations around Europe. The goal of the AIDAVA project is

1. to improve the quality, FAIRness, interoperability, and portability of heterogeneous, multimodal Personal Health Data (PHD) with specific attention to extraction of structured data from unstructured sources;
2. to increase value and reusability of PHD through integration and semantic enrichment within multimodal knowledge graphs (KG) supported by standard ontologies;
3. to optimize the data curation & publishing process by orchestrating complementary AI technologies into a virtual assistant that maximizes automation and helps users—clinical staff and potentially patients—when automation is not possible, while adapting to users’ preferences and skill levels;
4. to ensure compliance with EU ethical and data privacy requirements when processing personal data;
5. to demonstrate the value of the developed novel tools for preventive care (longitudinal health record of cardiovascular patients with established risk of cardiovascular disease (ASCVD)), and for more effective treatment (breast cancer registries federated across hospitals).

In this project, the successful candidate will be responsible for the data extraction, annotation and curation pipeline for the use cases of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool developed within the project. Furthermore, the successful candidate is expected to conduct research on the challenges surrounding the use of routinely collected clinical data for improvement of care. Further details about the project can be found in the website https://aidava.eu/.

The successful candidate will join a cross-faculty team consisting of computer scientists, medical professionals, informaticians, PhD students, software engineers and post-doctoral researchers.

Specific:
You have a master’s degree in data science, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, biomedical sciences, or equivalent and have good programming skills.
Experience with machine learning, ontologies, FAIR data and software engineering skills are a plus.

Generic:
You are an open-minded, team-player, motivated, independent researcher with ownership who is able to take initiative and takes pride in their work. You are fluent in English, both in speech and writing. We are looking for a researcher with a special interest in health care research and motivated to build a scientific career in the area of basic and translational research. You will closely collaborate with other members of both departments.

The full-time position is offered for 4 years. The first year will be a probation period, after a positive assessment the position will be extended for another 3 years. Each year an evaluation will take place.

Your salary will be € 2,541 gross per month in the first year up to € 3,247 gross per month in the fourth year according to the PhD-candidate salary scale. On top of this, there is an 8% holiday and an 8.3% year-end allowance. 
In addition to good primary employment conditions, UM also offers an attractive package of secondary employment conditions.

The terms of employment of Maastricht University are set out in the Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities (CAO). Furthermore, local UM provisions also apply. For more information look at the website www.maastrichtuniversity.nl > About UM > Working at UM.

Maastricht University is renowned for its unique, innovative, problem-based learning system, which is characterized by a small-scale and student-oriented approach. Research at UM is characterized by a multidisciplinary and thematic approach, and is concentrated in research institutes and schools. Maastricht University has around 22,000 students and about 5,000 employees. Reflecting the university's strong international profile, a fair amount of both students and staff are from abroad. The university hosts 6 faculties: Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Faculty of Law, School of Business and Economics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience. 
For more information, visit www.maastrichtuniversity.nl.

The Clinical Data Science group is a computer science focused department embedded within a clinical environment (MAASTRO Clinic and Maastricht UMC). The Clinical Data Science group focuses on three main research areas: building global data sharing infrastructures; applying machine learning to build models from these data; and, using these models to improve healthcare.

For this project, there is close collaboration with Maastro's Clinical Data Science group,with MUMC+, and the Institute of Data Science (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/ids/contact).