Reporting to the Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth, the post is part of a research group with responsibility for carrying out research for a discrete area of a large project. The Senior Research Fellow will provide guidance to junior members of the research group including research assistants, PhD students, and/or project volunteers. This is an exciting opportunity to join the new Big Data Institute, based at the University of Oxford, working with Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth and a national consortium of COVID19 transmission modellers. Research at the BDI is focussed on analysis of biomedical big data, and generation of health knowledge and information. You will be leading research on the transmission dynamics of COVID19. They will be working within a team of modellers at BDI but also with partners in other universities in the UK in a
consortium of COVID19 modellers, including Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester and Warwick. You will be expected to rapidly (sometimes less than a week) and collaboratively respond to stakeholder requests, analysing data, developing new models to address new questions, and fit models to data. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the national response to the pandemic. The COVID-19 modelling consortium will be outward-facing and inclusive, helping to add value to a range
of existing and new COVID-19 activities. The consortium already has strong links with many organisations active on COVID-19 research, including the Alan Turing Institute, the Royal Statistical Society, HDR-UK, PHE and the Royal Society. The consortium is also connected with broader COVID-19 research, including environmental modelling (Professor Cath Nokes on our governance board), and the planned ongoing research threads (e.g., within-host modelling and urban analytics) of the RAMP initiative (Professor Gog is a founding steering committee member). The experience of consortium researchers, working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded neglected tropical disease (NTD), malaria and HIV modelling consortiums, is that a focussed consortium can be a lightning rod for strengthening a broad range of
modelling, epidemiological and clinical research within and outside the consortium.
They aim of the consortium is to provide high quality scientific advice to national policy makers, as well as provide input to a range of scientific activities. This requires not only excellence in multidisciplinary, collaborative research, but also a passion for effective communication of the outputs in novel and accessible ways.