Research Fellow in Machine Learning for Dementia Risk Profiling

View All Vacancies
Vision, Speech & Signal Processing
Location:  Guildford
Salary: 

£34,980 to £39,347
per annum
Fixed Term
Post Type:  Full Time
Closing Date: 
23.59 hours GMT on Sunday 19 November 2023
Interview Date: 

To be confirmed
Reference:  058823

The University of Surrey is a global community of ideas and people, dedicated to life-changing education and research. 

We are ambitious and have a bold vision of what we want to achieve – shaping ourselves into one of the best universities in the world, which we are achieving through the talents and endeavour of every employee.  

Our culture empowers people to achieve this aim and to collectively, and individually, make a real difference.  

The Centre for Vision, Speech, and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey seeks to recruit an outstanding post-doctoral researcher in the field of machine learning for analysing electronic healthcare records to identify people at risk of developing dementia for a full-time position as soon as possible. The post is funded by the UK-DRI and is fixed-term for up to 9 months.

The main responsibility of the post holder will be to pre-process large healthcare records available to the project and development of machine learning techniques to detect risk of developing dementia. The post holder will benefit from the research environment provided by CVSSP and UK-DRI Care Research and Technology Centre at Imperial College London. Applicants should hold a relevant PhD/DPhil (or be near completion) degree with experience in machine learning, health informatics, or data science. More details about this post can be found in the attached job description.

The role

New pharmaceutical interventions such as Lecanemab offer new opportunities to slow cognitive decline and improve the quality of life for people with Alzheimer’s disease. The emerging interventions will, however, be beneficial if they are used at an early stage of the disease. Predicting the risk of dementia in older people with memory issues is challenging and often not accurately possible without imaging and further investigation. Under-recognition of dementia is currently a major concern in the ageing population, but there is little work on building systems to analyse the risk of dementia for large populations that can be used in primary care settings. This pilot research will provide a feasibility study by exploring medical records and building machine learning tools to predict the risk of dementia. The project will be validated on one of the world’s largest healthcare datasets from the Imperial College NHS Trust, which includes over 2 million individuals’ electronic healthcare records data linking hospital, primary care, and social care records. 

The main responsibility of the post holder will be the development of machine learning techniques for dementia risk screening.  

How to apply

Applicant are required to submit their application online before 19th November 2023. As a part of the selection process, a test and an interview will be conducted. Informal enquiries are welcome and should be directed to Dr Samaneh Kouchaki, [email protected] .

Please note, it is University Policy to offer a starting salary equivalent to Level 3.6 (£34,980) to successful applicants who have been awarded, but are yet to receive, their PhD certificate.  Once the original PhD certificate has been submitted to the local HR Department, the salary will be increased to Level 4.1 (£36,024).