Applications are invited for 4-year PhD studentship (starting October 2025) based in the University of Cambridge’s Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit and the new AstraZeneca Discovery Centre at Cambridge. The student will be working on a collaborative project entitled “Partitioning the effects of high body mass index on risk of future comorbidities”, jointly supervised by Dr Samuel Lambert (Assistant Professor of Health Data Science, University of Cambridge) and Dr Xiao Jiang (Senior Data Scientist, Centre for Genomics Research, AstraZeneca).
High body mass index (BMI) is a highly prevalent modifiable risk factor for many cardiometabolic and renal diseases, but also multiple cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. BMI remains a crude measure of risk as not all people with high BMI get all possible comorbidities. This motivates research into the possibility of predicting which specific comorbidities of high BMI (obesity) an individual is most likely to develop.
The project will harness large-scale human genetic resources with deep phenotyping data (e.g., UK Biobank, INTERVAL, BELIEVE) to interrogate the molecular aetiology of BMI and identify discrete axes of risk that may inform more personalized medicine and identify therapeutic targets. The student will employ genomic and computational approaches (e.g. GWAS, polygenic scores, Mendelian randomization, machine learning methods) integrating genetic data, health records, and multi-omics data from blood.
Candidate
Applicants should hold (or have achieved by the start date) a first or upper second-class degree from a UK university, or an equivalent standard from an overseas university, and preferably a Master’s degree (or equivalent), in a relevant subject (e.g. epidemiology, (bio)statistics, genomics, bioinformatics). They should have strong quantitative skills, experience with programming (e.g., R, Python, etc), and enjoy working in a team environment.
The position is open to UK citizens or overseas students who meet the UK residency requirements (home fees). International students who are able to cover the additional costs of overseas tuition fees through scholarships or funding schemes will also be considered (self-funding is not permitted).
See https://www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/ for full details of entrance requirements and additional funding sources.
