As a Postdoctoral Researcher in statistical/mathematical modelling, your role will involve analysis of study designs that can, in response to accumulating data, adapt decisions about how to allocate vaccines to trial participants in order to determine which vaccines and deployment strategies are most effective faster.

You will hold a relevant PhD/DPhil in statistics, epidemiology or a closely related area, or have equivalent relevant experience. You should also have experience with the statistical programming language R and be able to demonstrate the ability to produce high-quality academic writing. Experience with Bayesian methods, though not essential, would be a distinct advantage.

This position is available on a full-time basis, fixed-term for 18 months in the first instance but with the possibility of being extended.

Only applications received before 12.00 midday on 22 October 2018 will be considered.

Overview of the role

Reporting to the Ben Cooper, the post-holder will work on developing and evaluating novel trial designs for evaluating vaccines in infectious disease emergencies. This will involve analysis of study designs that can, in response to accumulating data, adapt decisions about how to allocate vaccines to trial participants in order to determine which vaccines and deployment strategies are most effective faster.

This role will be part of a cross-institution research team, funded by the NIHR under a vaccine epidemiology call “Leveraging Pathogen Sequence Data and Adaptive Designs to Improve Vaccine Trials in Emerging Epidemics in LMICs”. This collaboration will develop new approaches to rigorously evaluate and implement adaptive vaccine trials in the midst of an emerging epidemic, aiming to: (A) use genetic data to improve a clinical trial’s ability to measure the effectiveness of a vaccine; (B) improve and develop novel adaptive designs for a vaccine effectiveness trial in an ongoing epidemic; and (C) bring together the work of (A) and (B) with research to develop and improve real-time inference and prediction for transmission models using multiple sources of data (including genetic data as in (A)), to inform an adaptive trial, as in (B). The post holder will focus on aim B and will be based at the Epidemic diseases Research Group Oxford (ERGO).

In addition to Oxford collaborators, the research team includes academic partners at Harvard University (Harvard School of Public Health), leading on aim (A), and the University of Cambridge, leading on aim (C), as well as non-academic project partners. The post-holder will collaborate with these groups (some travel is likely to be involved) and will also provide guidance to less experienced members of the research group, including post-doctoral researchers, research assistants, technicians, and PhD and project students.

Responsibilities/duties

• Use simulation studies to develop and evaluate adaptive individually-randomized controlled trial designs where the allocation probability to the two study arms can change as a result of accumulated outcome data, exploring potential biases and analytical approaches to eliminate such bias. Analysis of such designs will require simulation- based statistical inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The post-holder will be expected to conduct this analysis in R making use of interfaces to established MCMC software (Stan or JAGS).
• To extend analysis of adaptive trial designs to address problems of multiplicity including: multiple candidate vaccines; multiple candidate dosing regimens; and multiple possible target groups to receive the vaccine.
• Extend the above work to consider cluster-randomized designs.
• Collaborate with the Cambridge and Harvard teams on all three aims of the project.
• Make software developed as part of this project publically available in an R package, together witch tutorial material explaining how to use it.
• Prepare manuscripts describing important methodological advances.
• Develop a Shiny web application or similar to provide a user-friendly interface for the evaluation of different vaccine trial designs for epidemic emergencies.
• Manage own academic research and administrative activities. This involves small scale project management, to co-ordinate multiple aspects of work to meet deadlines.
• Develop ideas for generating research income, and present detailed research proposals to senior researchers.
• Present findings at scientific conferences and public meetings.
• Act as a source of information and advice to other members of the group on methodologies or procedures.
• Represent the research group at external meetings/seminars, either with other members of the group or alone.
• Carry out collaborative projects with colleagues in partner institutions, and research groups.