Edit: Jan 2024 – applications for these positions are now closed
We are looking for new members to join our Wellcome-funded team of cardiac electrophysiology modellers, to develop mathematical models of ion channel currents and cardiac cells for assessing the safety of new pharmaceutical drugs.
Two posts are available, and these are one year fixed-term research positions available from 1st Feb 2024 until 31st Jan 2025. You’ll be joining a research team including me, 4 postdocs, 3 PhD students and a Research Software Engineer, so you’ll gain great experience of teamwork in what I call “unusually-applied” maths.
A Senior role is available for experienced postdoctoral researchers, which is appointed on the same pay grade as a Lecturer/Assistant Professor; whilst the other will be suitable for you if you have just finished/are finishing a PhD or have a few years of postdoc experience.
We are looking for experience in EITHER:
- Mathematical modelling of a biological system involving numerical simulations. We’ll probably focus on ODE models but experience of e.g. ODE, PDE or stochastic/agent-based modelling is fine. Some experience of electrophysiology modelling would be a plus but is not essential and can be learned ‘on the job’.
- Statistics/data science – fitting mechanistic models to real experimental data and performing uncertainty quantification/inference in a frequentist or Bayesian framework. Experimental design and/or considering model discrepancy are desirable but not essential.
Your particular focus (depending on the strengths and interests of the successful candidates) could include:
- How best to use the dynamic-clamp (real time simulation/experiment interaction) technique in model building.
- Cell-specific / drug-specific electrophysiology model construction.
- Working on methods for experimental design, to optimise parameter identifiability, but also to perform model selection, minimise the influence of experimental artefacts, and assess/forecast the difference between the model and reality.
- Building on the Cardiac Electrophysiology Web Lab (https://scrambler.cs.ox.ac.uk/) to record and reproduce the process of fitting a model to data and testing it.
- Working to link new features like our cardiac electrophysiology metadata into the CellML Physiome Model Repository (www.cellml.org) to help with reproducibility and model re-use.
I think that our main problems in terms of “making quantitative predictions” in the cardiac modelling field are related to deriving biophysically-based mechanistic models from experimental data (replacing what are often subjective modelling choices with automated algorithms to make this reliable and reproducible). Plus making future predictions with appropriately quantified uncertainty due to all the factors about which we’re uncertain (not just parameter uncertainty… but all the sources of uncertainty and variability that I bang on about in talks).
You’ll find a lot of our open questions discussed in various past posts here on this blog and in our recent publications.
We’ll be working closely with: pharmaceutical industry labs; pharmaceutical regulators (including the FDA) who we have worked with to develop ways to assess trustworthiness of cardiac simulations and uncertainty quantification for regulatory use; and academic labs (in particular Teun de Boer’s lab in UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands and Adam Hill & Jamie Vandenberg‘s labs in Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Sydney, Australia) with whom we are looking at the dynamic clamp technique and ways to gain more information on drug binding to ion channels. So candidates must enjoy teamwork, collaborative inter-disciplinary projects, and be prepared to get into the lab for a few weeks to really get to grips with the experiments we are trying to use.
Here are the links to the full role profiles and application forms, the deadline for applications is 15th January:
- Postdoc: https://jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=SCI578023
- Senior postdoc: https://jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=SCI578123
Please send informal enquiries to gary.mirams@nottingham.ac.uk
Mathematical Matters of the Heart 