The Clinical Therapeutics Unit at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok is recruiting a Data Scientist who will be supervised by Professor Nicholas White. MORU has 40 years’ experience in conducting research which translates successfully into global health medical advances.
The work will be broadly focused on optimising treatments for infectious diseases of global public health importance. This will involve data analysis and statistical modelling of a wide variety of data types (longitudinal, clinical, pharmacometric, genetic and spatial). An interest in causal inference is of particular importance. You will have the flexibility to choose the projects of the most interest to you.

Key projects include:

• Optimising the treatment of falciparum malaria: multidrug resistance in falciparum malaria is a major threat to malaria control and elimination. MORU is developing triple therapies to counter this threat. This project will involve modelling parasite clearance kinetics to determine optimal
  endpoints in phase 2 trials.
• Optimising the treatment of vivax malaria: tafenoquine is the first new drug developed for vivax malaria in over 50 years, but the current recommended dose is too low. This project will involve a large meta-analysis of all tafenoquine clinical trials, jointly analysing pharmacokinetic, parasite genetic, and clinical data to determine optimal dosing regimens.
• Optimising the treatment of Chagas disease: there is currently no validated approach for testing the in-vivo activity of new anti-parasitic drugs for this major neglected disease. MORU is developing a platform for designing phase 2 clinical trials. This project will involve modelling intrahost parasite kinetics.
• Anti-viral therapeutics for early COVID-19: MORU is running a large multi-country platform trial evaluating the antiviral activity of new and repurposed drugs (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05041907). This project will involve modelling viral kinetics and characterising the impact of vaccination, virus genotype, admission antibody titres and patient demographic characteristics on viral clearance kinetics.

It is not necessary to have any previous experience with or knowledge of these subjects. Interest, curiosity, mathematical ability and creativity are required however.