Your job
As junior researcher/teacher in pharmacoepidemiology, you will be involved with a new project, ADEPT, which is conducted by the EU PE&PV Research Network and funded by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The project aims to study the utilisation trends of antiepileptic drugs in Europe in both men and women of childbearing age, and pregnant women. The project also aims to assess the feasibility of conducting studies on both paternal and maternal exposure to antiepileptic drugs and adverse neonatal and child outcomes. The teaching part of this position will be within Eu2P, the first European training programme in pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology.

The position will be divided over two roles. You will spend 90% of you time as junior researcher for the ADEPT project, and 10% of your time as a teacher within the Eu2P programme.

In the ADEPT project, you will contribute to and assist the lead investigators with project management and scientific conduct of the project. Concretely, you will:

• schedule, prepare and attend the weekly meetings with data access partners (DAPs), and the monthly meetings with the EMA and consortium partners;
• act as the first point of contact with DAPs and support them with conduct of studies;
• conduct literature review;
• conduct a pharmacoepidemiology study as a part of the project, including data analysis, visualisations, interpretation and writing of the results;
• assist in writing and review project deliverables (i.e., study reports and manuscripts).

For the Eu2P programme, you will act as the trainer of courses included in our Eu2P training programme for the Master's of pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology. Concretely, you will:

• have daily contact with students to facilitate the teaching process;
• monitor and review students’ assignments on the Eu2P platform;
• conduct the admin work of the course (if necessary).

You are interested in pharmacoepidemiology and real-world-data studies and have a learning and exploring attitude. You are keen to develop yourself personally and professionally. You have good collaboration and communication skills. Specifically, you have:

• a Master’s degree in Epidemiology, Drug innovation, or a closely related field in biomedical sciences (or are close to completing);
• affinity for teaching;
• excellent command of English (verbal, written);
• good scientific writing and presenting skills.

We consider it a plus if you bring:

• experience in working with big data in healthcare, such as electronic medical records, claims, or registry data;
• knowledge and skills of programming in a common platform (such as R, or SAS);
• teaching experience.

We offer:

• a position for 10 months (1.0 FTE);
• a gross monthly salary of €3,226 in the case of full-time employment (salary scale 10.0 under the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO NU));
• 8% holiday pay and 8.3% year-end bonus;
• a pension scheme, partially paid parental leave and flexible terms of employment based on the CAO NU.

In addition to the terms of employment laid down in the CAO NU, Utrecht University has a number of schemes and facilities of its own for employees. This includes schemes facilitating professional development, leave schemes and schemes for sports and cultural activities, as well as discounts on software and other IT products. We also offer access to additional employee benefits through our Terms of Employment Options Model. In this way, we encourage our employees to continue to invest in their growth. For more information, please visit Working at Utrecht University.

Universiteit Utrecht

A better future for everyone. This ambition motivates our scientists in executing their leading research and inspiring teaching. At Utrecht University, the various disciplines collaborate intensively towards major strategic themes. Our focus is on Dynamics of Youth, Institutions for Open Societies, Life Sciences and Pathways to Sustainability. Sharing science, shaping tomorrow.

Working at the Faculty of Science means bringing together inspiring people across disciplines and with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. The Faculty has six departments: Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Information & Computing Sciences, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Together, we work on excellent research and inspiring education. We do so, driven by curiosity and supported by outstanding infrastructure. Visit us on LinkedIn and discover how you can become part of our community.

The Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences (UIPS) is the research institute of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Utrecht University. UIPS focuses on processes around discovery, development, and use of drugs and medical nutrition using molecular and technological principles from the Natural and Life Sciences. This research is ideally positioned in the Faculty of Science to work on basic scientific problems and to translate new findings into potential solutions to urgent societal medical needs, which are addressed in the Faculties of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Every year around 400 peer-reviewed articles are published and around 30 PhD candidates defend their thesis. UIPS is partner in several open-source innovation networks.

As a junior researcher/teacher you will be employed in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Clinical Pharmacology, at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The Division of Pharmacoepidemiology & Clinical Pharmacology consists of a multidisciplinary team of young and internationally oriented researchers. The research program is directed at several epidemiological, therapeutic, and policy aspects of chronic drug use with a focus on advanced affordable biomolecular and cellular therapies.

The Centre for Pharmacoepidemiology is embedded in the division. The centre aims to apply, develop, improve, and evaluate innovative observational pharmacoepidemiologic methods to obtain reliable information on benefits and harms of medicines after marketing in real life. Methodological innovations are inspired by relevant research questions in clinical practice, pharmaceutical policy, and regulation. Important themes are methods to measure impact of interventions, to prevent and/or control for confounding, analysis of effect modification (precision medicine), multi-database analysis, and innovative approaches for increasing validity and richness of data. The Centre for Pharmacoepidemiology has established the EU PE&PV (Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacovigilance) Research Network, and has developed novel methodologies for the conduct of multi-country, multi-database studies on variability of medicines’ use and patient outcomes.