Call opens to drive the future of health data research

Our researchers have opened applications for studentships in data-driven health, an opportunity for young health data researchers to forward this emerging field.

King’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Driven Health or DRIVE-Health is a collaboration between our NIHR Maudsley BRC and the NIHR Guy’s and St Thomas’ BRC. Its mission is to work to train the next generation of health data scientists within an active NHS environment with the skills they need to develop new models of data-driven care, leveraging significant recent investment and infrastructure in health data research within the UK.

The Centre is offering 3-4 studentships, with further studentships co-sponsored by the BRCs and industrial partners.  These will be spread across the Centre’s four scientific themes:

  • Learning from Big Data for Health – the use of data sources and person-produced content (e.g. from smartphone/wearables and social network activities), to address major public health challenges.
  • Knowledge Representation for Clinical Decision Support – the translation of data into actionable knowledge and the concept of trust in decision support.
  • Informatics for Next-Generation Clinical Trials – accelerating the pace and reducing the cost of clinical trials through the use of real world data, involving the use and development of statistical methods for causal inference, and efficacy and mechanisms evaluation as well as the use of wearables for digital transformation of trial endpoints.
  • Translating Informatics Research into Practice – training into the social, legal and ethical challenges of producing innovations that can be deployed into a highly-regulated and information-sensitive domain such as health.

The Centre is jointly led by Professor Richard Dobson and Dr Vasa Curcin.

Professor Richard Dobson, lead for Bioinformatics and mHealth for the NIHR Maudsley BRC, said: “The digital age provides the opportunity to transform the way we treat patients, but we’re suffering from a major skills gap. This Centre is therefore incredibly timely. We are leveraging a wide international network of NHS, industry, academic and third sector partners.

“Students will benefit from access to data that includes: anonymised electronic health record data from world-leading research hospitals, for real-time natural language processing; access to linked national genomics datasets; social media data for mental health studies; and wearables data from studies with over €100m investment in mobile health. The student projects will provide tangible, real-world benefit to patients and produce trained students with breadth and depth of transferable skills and experience. "

In addition to his role as Co-Director, Dr Vasa Curcin is a lead in the Guy's BRC Data analytics Cluster. He said: “After a long period of exploration, we, as a scientific community, are finally learning how to use our health data to develop effective digital interventions. King’s DRIVE-Health will produce a new generation of scientists, working across the academic, commercial and interdisciplinary interfaces to deliver real-world impact for patients and health systems.” 


Tags: Training & capacity development -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 10 Feb 2020, 16:00 PM


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