This role would typically be suitable for someone with a few years postgraduate experience or someone looking for a postdoctoral type role. As postholder you would, in conversation with your line-manager, be expected to lead research and development of the team’s work under the HPRU. Depending on the level of demand on the team you may supervise short-term placement students and interns or PhDs within the HPRU. You would bring mathematical / technical expertise to ensure that scientific and other outputs are produced in a timely way.

The team’s work-packages currently comprise:

• Source-term estimation – locating pathogen sources from case data.
• In-host dynamics – how a pathogen behaves inside the human body.
• Model frameworks – high level code for the rapid production of models.
• Neural networks for model emulation and machine vision – using the power of inferential tools to speed up models and to detect health threats.

The specific projects under the HPRU likely assigned to this role, either directly or in collaboration with others in the team, being:

• Applied records of traumatic events and mass injury surveillance

This aims to create a global database of non-fatal injuries, including sequelae (e.g. disease, deprivation) and probability of survival. Focussing especially on disadvantaged communities, we will explore the long-term burden of disease, psychosocial sequelae and socioeconomic hardship of survivors of a major incident.

• Syndromic surveillance of injury and correlates of community resilience

This project will look at the syndromic surveillance of injuries and observe how these may predict incoming demand on the health system and will: characterise the nature and seasonality of such reports, investigate linkable statistics to help drive causal inference, look into the differential of report types between different types of medical unit.

You would be expected to be knowledgeable in some mathematical, statistical, or computational techniques and be willing to learn others. Similarly, you will be able to show ability to progress projects and may contribute to developing the project portfolio within the team through grant applications and other funding opportunities.

You will be expected to be a role-model for the technical and behavioural aspects of the team. In the latter aspect, team skills are important to this role as is demonstrating a forward-looking and investigative nature.

You should be able to identify, discuss and act on your own professional performance and training / development needs and would be expected to attend virtual or physical internal and external training events. This would include all mandatory training (e.g. fire safety, information governance, etc.)

As postholder you will develop working relationships, communicate, and maintain vital interactions with collaborators in academia and across government and would comprise regular contact with a wide range of individuals, clinical and non-clinical, internal and external to UKHSA. This is expected to include: daily collaboration with the other members of the Modelling for EPRR team and individuals within the wider Advanced Analytics (AA) division (which includes Data-science, Economics, and Epidemiology Teams); regular contact with other members of the wider Analysis and Intelligence Assessment directorate and people within the HPRU at University of Birmingham, with the AA senior leadership team, directorate and HPRU administrative staff, and with HPC support staff; and periodic or occasional contact with other modelling, statistics and epidemiology teams within UKHSA, Dstl, DHSC, Cabinet Office and other similar organisations.

The above is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. You will carry out any other duties as may reasonably be required by the agency.