Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Epidemiology at UCL

About us

The mission of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health is to improve the health and well-being of children, and the adults they will become, through world-class research, education and public engagement. The UCL GOS ICH, together with its clinical partner Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, forms the largest concentration of children’s health research outside North America. GOS ICH’s activities include active engagement with children and families, to ensure that our work is relevant and appropriate to their needs. GOS ICH generates the funding for our research by setting out our proposals in high quality applications to public, charitable and industrial funding bodies and disseminates the results of our research by publication in the medical and scientific literature, to clinicians, policy makers and the wider public. The Institute offers world-class education and training across a wide range of teaching and life learning programmes which address the needs of students and professional groups who are interested in and undertaking work relevant to child health.

About the role

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an individual with expertise of analysing large, complex databases to support the establishment of the Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort (KEHC). KEHC is a new national birth cohort for England, consisting of linked vital statistics, health, education, Census and environmental datasets. KEHC will be made available to researchers via the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Secure Research Service. The purpose of setting up the cohort is to allow research into how the physical and social environments in and around children’s homes and schools affect their health and education outcomes. The post holder will support the development of the cohort by obtaining the required ethical and data approvals, clean and validate the cohort datasets, develop user guides, training and documentation. This is an excellent opportunity for someone with experience in analysing administrative datasets such as Hospital Episode Statistics, Census or the National Pupil Database and a keen interest in environmental epidemiology or health geography to develop a globally unique data resource for environmental child health research. The salary offered will be at either grade 7 (research fellow) £39,508 – £47,355 per annum or grade 8 (senior research fellow) £48,614 – £57,041 per annum depending on skills and experience and is funded until 11 December 2025 in the first instance.

About you

The successful candidate will have a doctorate in epidemiology, statistics, demography, geography or other relevant quantitative science or equivalent level of attainment. They will also need experience of analysis of large, longitudinal data sets by writing and executing code in statistical software packages (e.g., Stata or R). Experience of cleaning and management of complex databases using statistical software packages, SQL, R, Stata or equivalent is essential as well as writing papers for peer-reviewed journals and experience of literature searching and review.