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Postdoctoral Fellow Position: observational studies of large scale patient data

We are seeking to immediately hire a Postdoctoral Fellow in support of a recently funded Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) project, “Longitudinal Comparative Effectiveness of Bipolar Disorder Therapies”. The principal investigator of the project is Dr. Christophe Lambert, University of New Mexico, Center for Global Health, Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Translational Informatics. This research is conducted in collaboration with researchers and physicians from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, patient advocates and leaders from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), two fellows of the American Statistical Association, and researchers from UCLA, Montana State University, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) collaborative. Funding for this position extends through June 30, 2019.

A successful candidate will join a dynamic team of more than 20 people that spans the fields of psychiatry and psychiatric pharmacology with deep expertise in bipolar disorder, clinical research informatics, computer science, and statistics. Importantly, our research project directly engages patients with bipolar disorder as research partners in developing a large body of comparative effectiveness evidence for bipolar disorder therapies. Our team has access large scale administrative claims databases of over 100 million patients, including over 1 million patients with bipolar disorder. The PI and other team members are members of the OHDSI collaborative, whose vision is, “a world in which observational research produces a comprehensive understanding of health and disease”. Our research efforts are working towards the day when high-quality safety and effectiveness evidence is continuously generated, scrutinized, and updated within a culture of reproducible research, and deployed at the point-of-care to significantly improve patient outcomes. An ideal candidate will have the drive, skills, cognitive capacity, and passion to make a large contribution towards making this vision a reality.

We believe the best combination of skills to augment our team is someone with dual expertise in psychiatry/clinical or experimental psychology and statistics (or comparable degree); that is, a research-oriented MD or PhD in one discipline, with training, skills, and experience in the other. The successful candidate will spearhead running studies, and be a lead and supporting author on manuscripts. She/he should have a strong capability of distilling and synthesizing evidence from the literature to set the stage for designing each study, and have strong written communication skills to publish the study background, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions.

The successful candidate will have access to mentorship from world experts in bipolar disorder, neuropharmacology, clinical research informatics, and statistics. The candidate will participate in proposal development for future funding, and by the end of the fellowship, the candidate should have produced an impressive body of literature to launch an independent career in observational research.

Minimum qualifications: A PhD, MD or MD/PhD with expertise in one or more of the following areas: psychiatry, clinical or experimental psychology, statistics, clinical research informatics, and biomedical informatics. Must have excellent communication and writing skills.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Knowledge in the field of bipolar disorder
  • Experience designing, analyzing, and publishing observational studies.
  • Experience analyzing electronic health records data and/or administrative claims data.
  • Experience developing research proposals. Knowledge in psychiatric pharmacology.
  • Skill with the R statistical programming language and familiarity with SQL.

Interested applicants may apply here: https://university-of-new-mexico.workable.com/j/E7A9B22136

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