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ABOUT THE ROLE

We are recruiting a postdoctoral research scientist to lead virus evolution and bioinformatic data analysis for our program on wastewater surveillance for pandemic pathogens.
The world has never been at greater risk of new infectious disease pandemics. Global surveillance for emerging zoonotic viruses is inadequate to protect against this risk, especially in low-income populations that are at greatest risk. Wastewater surveillance potentially offers a scalable surveillance tool for the detection of spillover infection and human transmission of viral families of concern. We are funded by the Gates Foundation and the Institute of Philanthropy to establish the Wastewater Surveillance for Pandemic Prevention (WaSPP) network. This network will develop and pilot wastewater surveillance strategies, laboratory methods and analytical tools in Africa and Asia. Our protocols and software will be available to the community to allow wider testing and sustained implementation.
A critical part of WaSPP research agenda will be the analysis of virus sequence data generated through our surveillance activities. Surveillance will be based on next-generation sequencing of viral RNA/DNA extracted from wastewater samples. We plan to use these data to identify the virus and make inferences about potential human infection and transmission. This will involve analysis of viral evolution, simulation of potential scenarios and application of analytical pipelines to data generated by the WaSPP network.

WHAT YOU WOULD BE DOING

This is a three-year post that would suit a biologist or mathematician (or similar) with research experience in infectious disease epidemiology/ evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, with the ambition to advance global public health.
In the first year, the successful candidate will incorporate models of virus evolution into mathematical models of spillover infection and transmission of prototype viruses representing viral families concern to support the development of methods for virus sequence analysis and inference of human transmission.
They will subsequently support the analysis of wastewater surveillance sequence data following pilot implementation, including refinement of the models of virus evolution and contributing to the development of appropriate analytical pipelines and tools. The post involves working closely with the WaSPP team at Imperial and the wider WaSPP network in the UK, Ghana, DRC, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia.
The post offers substantial opportunities for publication of high impact research and engagement with centres of excellence in the UK and in countries at high risk of pandemic virus emergence.
The successful applicant will work in the Vaccine Epidemiology Research Group (VERG) within the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis. VERG consists of epidemiologists and laboratory scientists working on the epidemiology and immunology of viral and bacterial pathogens, with a particular interest in vaccines and genomics. We are a highly collaborative group with an international reputation.