The candidate will develop new statistical methodology and models to describe the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemics in Norway and across the Nordic countries. The present position is part of a Nordic collaboration project financed by NordForsk with Tom Britton, Stockholm University, Arnoldo Frigessi, Oslo University and Lasse Leskelä, Alto University as co-PIs. This recently funded Nordic research project will develop new mathematical and statistical methods for covid-19 analyses, including uses of new data streams, and to apply the methods on data in order to make conclusions of relevance to public health authorities, with a focus on the Nordic countries.

The main goal of the Oslo based project is to develop statistical models and inferential methods to describe the spread of the infection in space and type, also across the Nordic borders; exploit human mobility data in real time described by telecom mobility data; short term prediction and long term scenario predictions of the development of the pandemics; evaluation and comparison of alternative interventions. The project has unique access to COVID-19 data streams. The Nordic project will last for three years, with one postdoc employed in each of the three countries. The three research themes will collaborate closely. A similar Post Doc position is also announced at Stockholm University. It is expected that the postdoc also takes part in joint collaborative activities in the Nordic project. The candidate is expected to publish methodological and/or applied papers in high impact peer-reviewed scientific journals, and to present results at scientific conferences.

The Oslo candidate will be employed at OCBE. OCBE has eight professors, five associate professors, fifteen researchers, many post-doctoral fellows and PhD students, making up a group of about 80 scientists. OCBE is internationally recognized, with interests spanning a broad range of areas (including time-to-event models, data integration, causal inference, statistical genomics, Bayesian inference, stochastic simulation algorithms, probabilistic graphical models, machine learning, evolution and population genetics, informative missingness and measurement error models, epidemiological studies of lifestyle and chronic diseases, stochastic models for infectious diseases, high dimensional data and models) and numerous collaborations with leading bio-medical research groups internationally and in Norway. In the last national research evaluation, OCBE was judged as excellent by an international committee. OCBE has a leading role in the centre of excellence for research-based innovation BigInsight, a consortium of academic, industrial and public partners, with a funding of about 4 mil Euro annually until 2023. Furthermore, OCBE hosts the ERC Advanced Grant of Professor Corander (Scalable inference algorithms for Bayesian evolutionary epidemiology) and several further important projects in the areas of digital life sciences, systems medicine, statistical methods for biobank, health survey and registry data, causal inference and mathematical oncology. Professor Arnoldo Frigessi will supervise the postdoc