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Posts Tagged ‘researcher’

Construction workers are at a high risk for developing skin disorders as a result of exposure to a wide variety of allergens and irritants. The social and economic impact of occupational contact dermatitis is high, because prognosis is poor, and changing jobs is sometimes the only option for…

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Gram-negative bacteria producing extended-spectrum ß-lactamases (ESBLs) are rapidly emerging in Dutch hospitals and worldwide. Furthermore, livestock associated MRSA is highly prevalent in pig and veal farmers. Nosocomial infections caused by these bacteria are associated with increased…

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This position is available on a grant-funded project entitled “Dynamic Beauty: studying social impressions with realistic stimuli” to Dr Ian Penton-Voak, Dr Jeremy Burn, and Dr Andrew Clark (Brunel University). The focus of the grant concerns the social perception of human gait, and the post will involve the collection and analysis of videos of recruited participants.

The post is for two years from November 2010, and will be based in Bristol. If successful, you may be appointed either on a…

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Do you hold a degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related subject, Have you gained experience working in industry as part of an industrial placement or post graduation, Are you now looking to develop your career with a global, leading organisation? If so we are keen to hear from you!

Our client is a blue chip multinational FMCG company located in Surrey. Currently they have an excellent opportunity for a Graduate Mechanical Engineer to work as a key member of their Eur…

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You will be taking part in a research project to investigate which patients with severe hemophilia will develop inhibitors against clotting factor VIII. Our team has established that treatment patterns – particularly on initial administration of factor VIII – play a major role in the…

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This project aims to clarify the microscopic processes that determine polymer-metal adhesion during forming. Deformation and delamination processes on multiple scales will be studied numerically and experimentally.

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The population of Xuan Wei and Fu Yuan county, Yunnan Province, China is exposed to strikingly high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from conception through adulthood via the smoky coal they burn for heating and cooking. Nonsmoking women can be exposed to ten-times higher levels of PAH than a 20 cigarette per day active smoker.

Lung cancer rates in Xuan Wei and Fu Yuan county are among the highest in China and are similar in men and women, despite the fact that almost all women are nonsmokers. Molecular epidemiology findings from small pilot studies of genetic susceptibility and tumor mutation patterns provide support that this excess is caused primarily by PAHs.

Recently, there has also been some evidence that silica exposure might also be involved in the etiology of lung cancer in this region possibly as a synergistic effect with PAH exposure. This population provides a unique setting to carry out a potentially definitive study of the quantitative relationship between environmental exposure to PAH and lung cancer; to study the interaction between PAH and silica exposure; to evaluate both older and recently developed hypotheses on genetic susceptibility for PAH-driven cancer; and to study the molecular characteristics of tumors caused by these compounds. To take advantage of this special opportunity, we carried out a hospital based case-control study of lung cancer among non-smoking women in Xuan Wei and Fu Yuan county, Yunnan Province, China. In addition, we have conducted a large exposure survey to enable detail quantification and characterization of exposure to smoky coal and its constituents.

The research is carried out in collaboration with researchers of the US, National Cancer Institute and the center of disease control of Qujing, Yunnan Province, China. 

You will work in a multidisciplinary research team with epidemiologists, exposure assessors, geologists and statisticians. Your activities will focus on exposure data analysis and modeling, and epidemiological analyses. The candidate will publish the findings as papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. These papers will form the basis of the PhD thesis.

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Within the European FITTEST project on Future Internet testing, the Centre for Software Technology has an open position for a PhD student.

The topic of the work is to develop a new log-based diagnosis approach to assist continuous testing of Future Internet applications: due to the increasingly dynamic nature of internet applications, it becomes increasingly hard to obtain and maintain good testing coverage. Software system logs can provide complementary information when execution suddenly deviates from normal, and help testers to construct test-cases to test such deviations thoroughly, thereby increasing coverage again. One of the major topics of research is on how to enhance a log-based approach with the ability to automatically recognize that parts of the programs are potentially fragile and therefore require extensive testing and more precise logging. This demand for precision is countered by the need to keep the application’s load at an acceptable level. Since logging will happen live, another crucial issue is how to guarantee that the produced logs do not leak private information, and how to convince users that such is the case.

In addition to developing the diagnosis approach, you will also collaborate with other partners within the FITTEST project, e.g. to integrate the diagnosis approach into FITTEST’s unified continuous testing workbench and to conduct case studies. Our partners are: Polytechnic University Valencia, University College London, Bruno Kessler Foundation (Italy), B&M Systemtechnik (Germany), IBM (Israel), Softeam (France), and Sulake Corp. (Finland).

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Project title: “Double trouble: Consequences of Ocean Acidification – Past, Present and Future: Dinoflagellate Component

Along with climate warming, anthropogenic CO2 is currently causing a significant increase in ocean acidity: Double Trouble! The effects of ocean acidification on marine calcifying organisms and plankton, as well as the marine carbon cycle are still poorly understood. The present research program constitutes an integrated multidisciplinary approach, combining (1) laboratory experiments using organisms grown under CO2 controlled conditions (2) reconstructions of ocean acidification in the geological past, and (3) studies of the impact of ocean acidification on the marine carbon cycle. Together this will quantify the impact of ocean acidification on calcification and feedbacks on atmospheric CO2 levels. The impact of past ocean acidification on evolution and extinction will provide important constraints on the adaptation potential of marine calcifying organisms and non-calcifying plankton. Furthermore, results will allow for determining the consequences for the marine carbon cycle.

The project, which involves 3 PhD students and one Postdoctoral researcher, is a collaborative project of the Biology and Earth Sciences departments at Utrecht University, the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), and the Alfred-Wegener Institute for polar and marine research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. The project is sponsored by the Darwin Center for Biogeology.

Dinoflagellates are protists and are ubiquitous in all aquatic environments. They comprise a vital component of the total eukaryotic primary production in the oceans. Approximately 15% of the dinoflagellates exhibit a complex life cycle that includes the formation of an organic cyst. These cysts preserve well in sediments deposited under relatively low oxygen conditions (their fossil record goes back to the Late Triassic, ~215 million years ago), and have been widely applied in biostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental studies. Here we initiate a novel avenue in dinoflagellate research involving their stable isotope chemistry. Pilot studies have indicated that the differential incorporation of the stable isotopes 12C and 13C into dinoflagellates and their cysts is related to the CO2 concentration, and as such pH, of seawater. We aim to develop this relation into a new proxy for surface ocean carbon speciation using culturing experiments and test the relation using the past 150 years. The study will involve culturing of several dinoflagellate species with a long fossil range under various CO2 and pH conditions. Both the motile and cyst stages will be analyzed for stable isotope and associated biochemistry. Fossil cysts will be analyzed for their chemistry for the reconstruction of past ocean acidification events, such as the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (PETM, ~55 million years ago).

The primary place of work is Utrecht, The Netherlands. Components of the research will be carried out at the AWI, where the candidate will spend several stays of several months.

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This project is funded by a VIDI grant from the Netherlands’ Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The PhD student will spend time on doing research, following mathematics and statistics courses of IOPS and other institutes, and spend about 10% of the time on teaching courses at the BSc level. The PhD student will be supervised by Dr M. Moerbeek.

The aim of trials on event occurrence is to study if and when a particular event, such as onset of daily smoking or entry into parenthood, occurs. The timing of events may be in thin and precise units or in coarser intervals. In the second case one does not know the exact timing of the event; one only knows that it occurred within a particular time interval. Such discrete-time survival data are typically analyzed on basis of a generalized linear model, such as a logistic regression model.

The main research question in any trial is whether an experimental treatment differs from a control with respect some outcome variable. As many covariates or background variables, such as age and socio-economic status, may have an effect on the outcome they should be measured and included in the statistical model. Ignoring such variables may result in biased estimates of the treatment effect estimator and hence incorrect conclusions with respect to the effect of treatment.

The aim of this project is to investigate to what extent such biases occur and how they can be corrected for in the statistical model. We will also focus on the optimal design of trials with covariates and discrete-time survival data. The PhD student will write papers in international scientific journals, contribute to international conferences and write a PhD thesis.

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