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.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with the following experience and background:

• You hold a PhD in Statistics, Epidemiology, Mathematics, Econometrics, Methodology or a related field;
• You have a strong background in quantitative modelling enabling the development of new methods, as evidenced by publications in peer-reviewed journals;
• You have programming skills in R;
• You are able to explain complex statistical-methodological ideas to non-specialists;
• Knowledge of any of the areas involved in the project (such as multistate models, Bayesian statistics, MCMC, EM algorithm, Markov/semi-Markov models, interval-censored survival models);
• You are an enthusiastic and motivated colleague who enjoys teaching in addition to doing research;
• You have teaching experience and preferably have obtained a Basic Teaching Qualification (BKO), or are willing to obtain one;
• Ability to teach in Dutch language.

• A contract for 3 years in total with a minimum 0.8 fte (starting with a 1 year contract).
• Salary scale 10: € 3,230 to € 5,088 gross for full-time employment (depending on education and experience).
• In addition to a good basic salary, you will also receive 8.3% end-of-year bonus and 8% vacation allowance. Calculate your net salary here.
• Free and unlimited access to our online learning environment GoodHabitz.
• Pension accrual with ABP, of which we pay 70% of the premium.
• Reimbursement of 75% of your public transport expenses. Do you prefer to travel by bike? Then we have a good bicycle scheme.
• An active staff association and Jong Amsterdam UMC association, both of which organize fun (sports) activities and events.

Amsterdam UMC

Your position will be at the department of Epidemiology & Data Science, Sections 'Disease Modelling and Health Care Evaluation' and 'Big Statistics', For more information, take a look at the website: Bigstatistics.