Research Assistant (Imperial)
UK Dementia Research Institute
Dementia is the biggest health challenge of our century.
To date there is no way to prevent it or even slow its progression, and there is an urgent need to fill the knowledge gap in our basic understanding of the diseases that cause it.
The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative driving forward research to fill this gap.
The UK DRI at Imperial brings together researchers from diverse backgrounds with fresh perspectives, drawing on the university’s unique strengths, resources and focus on science, engineering, medicine and business. The team recognises that the challenges of dementia demand new concepts, new approaches and a diverse range of new research tools and directions. Their holistic approach views the ageing brain in the context of the ageing body, not in isolation.
We are seeking a highly motivated Research Assistant for a project focused on access, harmonisation, and integration of complex biomedical datasets in Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. The role centres on enabling high-quality, reproducible analysis across prescription data, longitudinal clinical records, wearable time-series data, and multi-omics datasets, with particular emphasis on preparing analysis-ready datasets that support downstream statistical and machine learning workflows.
You will work closely with Dr Cynthia Sandor within a collaborative and interdisciplinary environment embedded in the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College London.
What you would be doing
You will contribute to data access workflows, database and pipeline development, and cross-modal harmonisation of large-scale datasets from international cohorts and biobanks, including PPMI, UK Biobank, and All of Us, with a focus on designing scalable and reproducible data pipelines.
You will work with electronic health records, cohort data, and large-scale research datasets to develop pipelines for secure data access, data cleaning, longitudinal harmonisation, and quality control, ensuring that datasets are structured to support downstream clinical, statistical, and machine learning analyses. Through this work, you will enable robust, scalable research and contribute to a broader goal of improving understanding of disease mechanisms and treatment responses in Parkinson’s disease.
What we are looking for
We are looking for a creative and enthusiastic researcher who can take on a challenging role with considerable scope for independent contribution and personal growth. You will play a central role in advancing clinical data infrastructure, data harmonisation, and integrative data science research, particularly at the interface between data engineering and downstream analytical workflows.
While experience in machine learning is welcome, you should have a background in strong data engineering, data management, and analytical skills, and sufficient machine learning literacy to support downstream modelling and reproducible analysis, alongside a keen interest in neurodegenerative disease research.
You should be a highly motivated researcher interested in developing and applying computational approaches to access, clean, harmonise, and integrate complex biomedical datasets, including prescription records, longitudinal clinical data, wearable time-series data, and multi-omics data, in the context of Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. You will collaborate closely with research groups across the UK Dementia Research Institute and Imperial’s Department of Brain Sciences and will be supported in their scientific and career development.
If you are interested in this role, please contact Dr Cynthia Sandor [email protected]