The Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Researcher to work with Andrew Rambaut’s group, using virus genomic data to understand the phylodynamics, epidemiology, and molecular evolution of HIV in long-term patient cohorts and the generalised epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The successful applicant will be working closely with project collaborators at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, UCL and the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), as part of the PANGEA-HIV consortium studies. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this project aims to improve our understanding of HIV epidemiology in order to design targeted HIV control strategies and to understand impact of HIV interventions. The consortium’s goal is to analyse HIV-1 phylogenetic data, to identify the individual and population drivers, hubs, sources, sinks and dynamics of epidemic spread, and to translate that to information that is directly actionable in HIV prevention. The applicant will undertake analyses of over 15,000 HIV genomes and associated epidemiological data, developing state-of-the-art statistical models and tools to advance this goal.

Candidates will have a PhD in a relevant field (computational biology, computer science, mathematical biology or statistics), will have expertise in phylodynamics, molecular evolution or phylogenetic epidemiology of viruses, strong skills in computational biology, statistics or sequence data analysis and an interest in infectious disease research in a public health context. The candidates will have a track-record of publishing in peer-reviewed, academic journals and excellent communication skills.