Postdoctoral Research Associate in Community Science

About the role

The Postdoctoral Researcher will be primarily responsible for the planning, implementation, co-ordination and subsequent data analysis of a large-scale online community trial (PROSPECT community study). They will be responsible for developing the trial protocol, planning the project operating procedures, implementing the trial protocol, helping to develop a new web-based resource and interface for the trial, recruiting participants, ensuring all trial protocols are adhered to, and all milestones and deliverables are met. They will liaise with the academic collaborators within KCL and internationally. They will also play the lead role in analysing the data and writing manuscripts for journal submission.

The PROSPECT community trial is part of high-profile research programme (PROSPECT) funded by Cancer Grand Challenges; https://www.cancergrandchallenges.org/prospect. PROSPECT is an international research programme to investigate the global rise in colorectal cancers in younger adults. The international PROSPECT team aims to understand the underlying causes and mechanisms driving the development of early onset colorectal cancers and to develop and test innovative strategies to help prevent the disease in future generations. The PROSPECT community trial will develop and test new risk assessment and prevention methods. The study will involve recruitment of participants from a previous large scale on-line community study (the ZOE Health Study), risk assessment for early onset colorectal cancer, subsequent enrolment into a digital remote dietary intervention study, monitoring of compliance to the intervention and analysis of data.  The postholder will be based at the Department of Nutritional Sciences and will work closely with the PROSPECT team in the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London.

This post provides an exciting opportunity to develop expertise in community science, public health nutrition and on-line large scale research approaches. It would suit a candidate wishing to develop a career in novel approaches to tackle population disease prevention with a focus on nutrition and lifestyle.

This is a full time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an a fixed term contract from taking up the post until 30/08/2028.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• PhD in life sciences/ nutrition/ biological related topic
• Experience in research study management or a related role, along with a proven track record of successful project delivery
• Ability to plan a human intervention study; operational understanding of various participant recruitment, research and data collection methods. Familiarity with ethical standards and regulatory requirements in research
• Ability to undertake data analysis of large data-sets using programmes such as R, Stat or Python
• Committed to equality, diversity and inclusion, actively addressing areas of potential bias

* Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.

Desirable criteria

• Experience in running dietary intervention studies
• Experience in large online/remote health data research programmes, especially involving remote digital data collection and linkage
• Experience in developing new on-line web-based tools

Advert information