Older individuals respond in very diverse ways to interventions aimed at stimulating healthy ageing. Many lifestyle and nutritional studies have been performed in the past years and have collected molecular data to record the response to such exposures. In a public private initiative of eight research centres and nine private partners (VOILA: Vitality Oriented Innovations for Ageing Society), we aim to bring this data together and explore strategies to generate novel dynamic response markers from the joint analysis of such data to understand and predict the differences in the way older people respond to interventions. You will work on large molecular data resources in a team with students and focus on developing datamining methods for the identification of patients at-risk of accelerated ageing. In addition, you will disseminate your work by writing scientific manuscripts and presenting your research at international conferences. The combination of this work will get you a PhD title.

You hold a MSc degree Bioinformatics, Statistics, Biology or Nutrition. Experience of techniques derived from data sciences, including cluster analysis, dimensionality reduction, feature selection, and predictive modelling are required. You must be familiar with languages such as R or Python, and with basic epidemiological concepts. Knowledge of transcriptome, metabolome or proteome analysis and genetic associations studies is favoured but not required. You enjoy gaining, combining and translating knowledge from multiple fields and have an optimistic and kind nature.

Fixed-term contract: 4 years.

You work in an employment contract of 36 hours per week. Your placement should lead to a PhD thesis and is for a maximum duration of four years. Your salary is € 2,422 gross per month in the first year, progressing to a maximum of € 3,103 gross per month in the fourth year, based on a full time position (scale PhD students of the Collective Labor Agreement for University Hospitals).

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC)

At the Leiden University Medical Center, we continuously work on improving patient care. We invest in groundbreaking, international research and work with the latest equipment. Together with our team of doctors, medical specialists, teachers, academic researchers and supporting staff, we aim for the best quality in health care, education and international research. And we need you to realize our goals!

Department of Biomedical Data Sciences

You will be working at the Department of Biomedical Data Sciences including the section of Molecular Epidemiology and of Computational Biology, which holds an excellent track record on medical and molecular data statistics. In addition, you will spend part of your time at the Wageningen University in the group focusing on nutrition, interventions and healthy ageing. These groups aim to apply state-of-the-art techniques from data science in the medical and biological domain.