Interested in working on disease outbreaks, networks, genomics, clustering algorithms, simulations and R package development? Have a look at the new position which has just opened with RECON, based at Imperial College London.

Deadline for applications is 12th January 2016. Questions can be sent by email to Thibaut Jombart.

Find below an excerpt of the job description:

Identifying the likely sources of food contamination is key to responding efficiently to food-borne disease outbreaks. While such task is often near impossible using food distribution network data alone, the increasing availability of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) of pathogenic agents, combined with traditional epidemiological data, offers unprecedented prospects for addressing this issue. The aim of this new post is to harness the potential of these data, and design new statistical methods and software tools combining WGS and food distribution network data to identify and impute the origin of food-borne disease outbreaks.

This position offers great opportunities for exploring various methodological avenues to identify likely sources of infections and contamination pathways. Graph algorithms will be useful for identifying clusters of related cases, deriving quick diagnostics, and identifying key features of outbreaks, such as minimum numbers of introductions and monophyletic trees likely representing single introductions of the pathogen. Parsimony and likelihood approaches will be explored for inferring likely contamination events. Outbreak simulations will be used to test the methodology developed, and potentially used as a basis for Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). Besides simulated outbreaks, this research will rely upon the analysis of large genomic surveillance databases assembled by the Gastrointestinal Bacterial Reference Unit (GBRU) at Public Health England (PHE).

The methodology developed will be integrated in new user-friendly, open-source R software providing PHE with tools for visualising and analysing food-borne outbreaks, and ultimately help informing public health response. This tool will be released as part of the R Epidemics Consortium (http://www.repidemicsconsortium.org), an initiative created by the hosting institution to develop the new generation of statistical tools for outbreaks response using R.

See the official job ad on Imperial College’s website.