Postdoctoral Researcher in Neuroimaging

We are looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Neuroimaging based within the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN), reporting to Professor Karla Miller and Associate Professor Ludovica Griffanti. The project is funded by the NIHR Oxford Health BRC Brain Technologies theme, which focuses on the scientific/clinical interface to create and test accurate tools for measuring brain structure and function to improve risk identification, early diagnosis, outcome prediction and treatment targeting. 

Millions of hospital brain scans are performed globally each year. At the moment, these scans are interpreted by eye. This means the structure and content of the radiology reports is very variable, and even the most expert clinician may not be able to detect subtle changes in this way. In the research setting, we build powerful algorithms that analyse information objectively, compare scans across individuals or over time. However, these tools are mostly designed to analyse homogeneous data from groups of participants in research studies rather than to inform clinical decision making about individual patients based on variable clinical data. The post holder will contribute to the steps needed to deploy such brain-health markers to support individual patient decision making in clinical practice.

You will be primarily responsible for the development of methods to obtain comparable measures from scans acquired with different hardware in both clinical and research settings. This will involve i) assessing variability of brain-health markers across hardware and its impact on clinically-relevant outcomes; ii) developing a strategy to minimise non-biological variability in the measures and iii) implement it at the acquisition and/or image processing level. The project is in close collaboration with the University of Manchester, which will also provide access to brain scanners from three major vendors in clinics across the city with the aim of creating a standard output from all clinical settings. Some of your duties include developing questions, generate original ideas, and conduct individual research on data harmonisation approaches and techniques to standardise imaging phenotypes across MRI scanner platforms, contribute to the development of the harmonisation strategy for BRC and propose and conduct experimental investigations to assess the variability of imaging phenotypes across MRI scanner platforms.

It is essential that you hold a PhD/DPhil in engineering, physics, neuroimaging, or other related subject, have expertise in MRI analysis, ideally using FSL and expertise in scientific computation, optimisation techniques, and/or statistical methods.

It is desirable that you have experience with neuroimaging and/or a background in neuroscience, experience with machine learning and/or advance regression methods and a track record of independence, such as managing a research project and/or supervision.

Please see the below ‘Job Description’ for further details on the responsibilities and selection criteria, as well as further information about the university and how to apply.

The post is full time for a fixed term contract until 31st March in the first instance.

Only applications received before 12.00 midday on Wednesday 6th March will be considered.

Interviews will be held as soon as possible thereafter.