PRR Project

Summary

Environmental factors are one of the four determinants of health in the population, together with biological factors, lifestyles, and the health system. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the environment includes all those external factors to which the individual is exposed, regardless of his or her habits and health systems.Environmental epidemiology is the study of the effects of biological, chemical and physical factors of the external environment, on human health. Social and physical-chemical environments include environmental pollution, exposure to chemicals, temperature, humidity, noise, radiation, walkability of the place of residence, access to education, income (e.g. material deprivation), access to adequate nutrition, good housing conditions (e.g. energy poverty); safe neighbourhoods; and access to green spaces, among others. Environmental epidemiology also makes it possible to detect emerging health threats over time, through early warning systems for environmental health threats, useful for implementing mitigation tools.Causal models of diseases are increasingly being conceptualized based on the fact that individuals and populations’ health are influenced by multiple factors, namely, environmental ones. For instance, concepts like ‘liveability’ have recently emerged in Public Health (although already present before in another areas of knowledge) comprising some of the above-mentioned factors. Lately, there has been a growing focus on environmental factors in public health literature, as they would act upstream on the behavioural determinants of health. Therefore, knowing whether and how diseases are affected by environmental exposures becomes important so that early measures can be taken to prevent them. This approach offers greater potential for disease prevention, being useful for public health governance as it supports the development of evidence-based policies that inform decision-making on public health issues.The proposed position is for a PhD holder in the scientific areas of Environmental Epidemiology,  Statistics,  Biostatistics, Spatial Data Science, Spatial Applied Mathematics or similar areas, aiming at the development of work in R&D projects in the Department of Epidemiology of the National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge (INSA) in collaboration with other scientific departments at INSA. The specific requirements are: (1) PhD in Environmental Epidemiology,  Statistics,  Biostatistics, or similar areas; (2) knowledge and experience in environmental epidemiology for communicable and non-communicable diseases; (3) knowledge and experience on design, implementation, analysis and reporting of epidemiological studies aiming to merge environmental data with health outcomes, namely in: (i) monitoring trends in the health effects of hazards; (ii) estimating the effects of environmental exposures on health outcomes; (iii) comparing trends across geographic areas according to environmental exposures; (4) advanced knowledge and experience on statistics  analysis, namely, statistical modeling applied to environmental epidemiology, including but not limited to: mixed models, generalized linear models; bayesian spatial statistical methods; (5) independent programming skills, proficiency in R language, RStudio, RMarkdown, QGIS, ArcGIS or similar software; (6) experience in scientific production, namely, communications in congresses, articles in peer-reviewed journals and scientific reports; (7) high sense of responsibility, organization and orientation of work towards results; (8) good skills in relationship, communication and work in multinational and multidisciplinary teams; and (9) good knowledge of the English language (written and oral). The specific tasks from this job position include: (1) Monitoring trends in the health effects of hazards, in particular improving the statistical models used in early warning systems for extreme weather events already in place at INSA, in order to estimate trends and impacts on health (of heat and cold waves); (2) Estimating the effects of air pollution (i.g. particulate matter PM2.5, PM10) on non-communicable diseases continuing the work already developed at INSA; (3) Estimating the effects of radiation and other environmental exposures on cancer; (4) Effects of exposure to chemicals (i.g. heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, pesticides) on health outcomes; (5) Comparing disease risk trends across geographic areas according to environmental exposures.