PRR Project

Summary

Job descriptionThis profile is expected to hire a highly motivated researcher specialized in Biostatistics and its applications on a Global Public Health perspective. The selected candidate is expected to:Undertake methodological work on modelling health patterns and determinants and maintain up to date skills and knowledge of computational and statistical methods that are of relevance to Global Public Health.Participate in the design of research and development programs and their translation into successful projects.Participate in the supervision of the field work conducted at the national and international levels (namely in Lusophone African Countries).Publish in top journals and peer-reviewed international conferences.Advise on preparation of reports for funding agencies and ethics committees.Participate in GHTM and REAL meetings and seminars as appropriate aimed at sharing research outcomes and building interdisciplinary collaborations.Participate as a teacher in the institution´s training programs. Scientific ProfilePhD in Statistics, Epidemiology, Bioinformatics, Public Health or related areas. Consolidated experience in statistics and epidemiology, particularly in poverty-related diseases. Creative problem-solving skills in tropical settings are targeted skills with good communication skills in different cultures and population contexts. Other specific skills include: programming in Phyton, R or other languages; previous experience in modelling the epidemiology of infectious diseases and its determinants, namely in Lusophone African countries. RationaleIHMT through its RD&I Research Center GHTM aims at strengthening Portugal’s role as a leading partner in the development and implementation of a global health research agenda, providing evidence-based interventions to contribute to the promotion of equity in health and to the improvement of populations health. Its mission is to produce knowledge on global health and tropical medicine, develop tools and strengthen health systems through research, training and implement equity in sustainable Global Health. Population Health, Policies and Services Research Group (PPS) plays a key role within this context.In order to achieve these objectives, relevant quantitative research on cohort studies has been developed over the last 4 years. Currently, the GHTM hosts a unique cohort of 1000 immigrant and native children living in the Lisbon metropolitan area, who are followed over time together with their families. This infrastructure has been a major asset for analyzing different aspects of the health determinants of vulnerable groups, especially during COVID-19.In the future, it can be used as a basis to study, for example, the impact of conflict and climate change on migrant children and their families.  In order to extend this initiative further and to study additional aspects of health determinants, GHTM invited two relevant researchers from Brazil and Cape Verde to integrate the PPS group and together they developed two further cohorts of children of the same age in Cape Verde and Brazil (the main countries of origin for the children´s cohort in Portugal).Collaboration with the One Health Research Centre - NEST-CV, in Cape Verde (through its director, who is a PPS member) began in 2021 with the implementation of a cohort study following the health of 1000 Cape Verdean children from the island of Santiago. This initiative is now being continued through a project funded by LaCaixa-Gulbenkian Foundations.The collaboration with the University of São Paulo (through the coordinator of the MINA cohort of children in the Amazon region, who is a PPS member) started in 2022 and has been strengthened in 2024 with a CAPES internationalization project that brings together the coordinators of the Brazilian and Portuguese/Lisbon cohorts at IHMT-GHTM.Projects to integrate children´s health from Brazil and Cape Verde, focusing on the consumption of ultra-processed foods, climate change and the development of asthma and other allergic diseases, are planned to be implemented in 2024-25.All these databases need to be integrated and analyzed at multiple levels to extract rich and useful information to guide regional and national health policies. The proposed scientific profile for the Biostatistician to be hired fits perfectly and allows the consolidation of this relevant and unique research topic in Portugal, recently developed at GHTM IHMT NOVA.Conversely, studies developed under the umbrella of several GHTM cross-cutting themes will generate a huge amount of biological and clinical data (e.g. Biobank and travelers health) that has not yet been explored in all its dimensions and that will benefit greatly from the presence of a researcher with this proposed profile.