Research Assistant - Trial Coordinator DISCA Project

About us

The Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry is world-renowned for its progressive research in the field of child & adolescent mental health.

Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry | School of Academic Psychiatry | King’s College London (kcl.ac.uk) 

In 2025, the Department will be moving to the newly-built Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People (PMC). The PMC has been developed by the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People – a partnership between King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Maudsley Charity. The Centre’s aim is to reduce the rate and impact of child mental health through world-leading research and its speedy translation into clinical care. This will be achieved through the co-location of clinical & academic teams to ensure that clinically relevant research is translated into novel preventions and treatments to benefit young people.

The PMC is the only facility in Europe with a primary focus on the mental health of young people and will have a state-of-the-art clinical research facility with cutting-edge equipment & be the perfect environment for translational research for young people.

www.kcl.ac.uk/research/pears-maudsley-centre

https://slam.nhs.uk/pearsmaudsleycentre

About the role

This is an exciting opportunity to work on a multicentre project funded by the NIHR that examines the effects of digital sleep therapy in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. You will be based in KCL, London & work closely with Prof Rubia but be part of a multi-centre team led by Prof Catherine Hill &  Prof Samuele Cortese and others across London and Southampton (The DISCA project).

Home | DISCA Study (discasleep.org.uk) 

Katya Rubia - King's College London (kcl.ac.uk) 

The aim of the project is to test whether a newly developed digital parent-guided behavioural intervention for chronic insomnia in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (70% of people with ADHD have sleep problems) is significantly more cost-effective than treatment-as-usual (TAU) to improve sleep and other relevant outcomes (e.g., child behaviour & parental well-being, neuropsychological functioning and other measures).

The appointed person will assist in the set-up and operational management of the Sleep Buddy randomised controlled trial at the KCL research hub. The trial will evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a digital intervention for parents of children with ADHD and chronic insomnia.

You will work on the development of an exciting new digital sleep therapy for ADHD with a multidisciplinary team of sleep experts, cognitive neuroscientists, child psychiatrists & statisticians.

This is a part-time post (0.6 FTE), and you will be offered a fixed-term contract until 31st October 2027.

About you 

Essential criteria:

• Relevant BA degree
• Previous experience of working in a healthcare or research environment 
• Good IT literacy (MS office)
• Excellent communication in written and spoken English
• Ability to coordinate trial activities: plan and prioritise a range of one’s own, and the team’s, standard- and non-standard work activities, successfully plan and deliver projects over a period of several months 
• Ability to be proactive and creative to manage recruitment numbers
• Ensure regular liaison and communication with colleagues involved in managing the clinical trial, at participating sites and with parent support groups 
• Able to elicit information to identify specific site/trial needs 

Desirable criteria:

• Relevant experience with recruitment into trials 
• Experience of working in a team 
• Knowledge and experience of medical research methodology and statutory clinical trial regulations and GCP 
• Experience of clinical trials in the NHS or the commercial health research sector 
• Experience of successful project management

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