AZ funded Non-clinical PhD Studentship (Fixed Term) - Health Data Science

at  University of Cambridge

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.

Please refer the Job description for details