Determining a person’s biological age is a topic of great current interest. Although chronological age is strongly associated with disease and mortality, large heterogeneity exists between individuals, suggesting that the chronological “clock” does not properly describe an individual’s expected remaining lifespan. In the era of high-throughput molecular technologies, a promising line of research is to obtain omic-based biological “clocks”, which can truly capture the underlying health status of a person. Your research will focus on time to death as an outcome and you will investigate different types of high-dimensional prediction models for survival data. As PhD student in Biostatistics, you will mostly be active in research and developing novel methodology under the supervision of Prof. Hein Putter and Dr. Mar Rodríguez-Girondo. You will present your results locally and at international biostatistics conferences, and publish your results in statistics journals and as a PhD thesis. In addition, your work will involve collaborating with biomedical researchers and applying your methods to their data sets. You will need to write software to make your methods usable by others, and you will be expected to teach medical students (at most 10% of your time).

In short

• You hold a Master’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Biostatistics or a related field
• You have excellent programming skills in R or other statistical programming languages
• You are highly interested in novel statistical methodology and you have a profound interest in medical applications

You hold a Master’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Biostatistics or a similar subject with a strong mathematical background, and have a profound interest in medical applications. You have good communicative skills in English and enjoy collaborating with researchers outside your own field. Excellent programming skills in R or other statistical programming languages are essential.

Fixed-term contract: 4 years.

As a PhD candidate, you will be appointed for the duration of four years. Your salary is a maximum of € 2.495 in the first year, amounting to a maximum of € 3.196 in the final year (scale PhD students, Collective Labour Agreement University Medical Centers).

LUMC

At the Leiden University Medical Center, we continuously work on improving patient care. We invest in groundbreaking, international research and work with the latest equipment. Together with our team of doctors, medical specialists, teachers, academic researchers and supporting staff, we aim for the best quality in health care, education and international research. And we need you to realize our goals!

Department of Biomedical Data Sciences

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) is a modern knowledge center with over 7,000 staff members who are passionate about combating disease and improving patient care through scientific research. The Section Medical Statistics and Bioinformatics at the Biomedical Data Sciences Department is the largest biostatistics group in the Netherlands, and has a strong international reputation for research in high-dimensional data, genetics, survival analysis and causality. Here, you will work in a vibrant environment with 12 tenured research statisticians, 5 postdocs and 8 PhD students. Positioned within the applied context of the Medical Center, the group has intensive collaboration with medical researchers. Strong ties also exist with the mathematical statistics group at Leiden University.