Your challenge

The challenge: The burden of the corona crisis is high. Many covid-19 patients were in need of intensive care treatment. This required extensive expansions of the number of intensive care beds, devices for life support and health care professionals. Multiple policies were implemented to control the virus to avoid a shortage of intensive care capacity. These measures continue to disrupt the economy and society.

Therefore, it is pivotal to gain better insight in covid-19 and the factors that influence the progression of the disease. This allows us to better treat new covid-19 patients, to better estimate which patients will benefit from intensive care treatment and to better inform capacity planning.

The solution: We want to gain those insights by applying machine learning to large amounts of data on intensive care patients with covid-19. These data include the enormous variety of routinely collected data from electronic health records as well as data from electronic case record forms. About 50 hospitals have committed to participate in the ‘collaborating against corona using intensive care data project’.

Your tasks: Together, we will use state of the art machine learning techniques to identify which combination of treatment strategies and which individual patient characteristics are associated with the best outcomes. Your passion for machine learning along with your interest for medicine and health will add great value to the team. You will contribute to data preprocessing, model development and model validation and impress the team with state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and causal inference techniques. You will write new research proposals to further develop the field. You will share your findings at renowned conferences and publish in international peer reviewed journals. But most importantly, you will directly contribute to tackle the corona crisis and improve the outcome and quality of life of future covid-19 patients.

Your profile

• PhD in machine learning or related field;
• Track record in machine learning model development for time series;
• Experience with or interest in reinforcement learning and causal inference;
• Affinity with the domain of healthcare and medicine;
• Strong communication skills;
• Proven writing skills;
• Team player.

Your work environment

As a postdoc you will be part of the right data right now research team at the department of intensive care medicine at Amsterdam UMC, VUmc site. The team consists of researchers, data scientists, doctors and medical specialists and is closely linked to Amsterdam Medical Data Science.

Amsterdam UMC is the coordinating center. We work closely with the department of computational intelligence at VU University (Dr. Mark Hoogendoorn), University of Cambridge (Prof. dr. Mihaela van der Schaar) and the scale-up company Pacmed. The project is further supported by the National Intensive Care Evaluation Foundation (NICE, Prof. dr. Nicolet de Keizer) and the Dutch Society of Intensive Care (NVIC, Prof. dr. Diederik Gommers) and is partially funded by the urgent trajectory of the predictive diagnostics and treatment call of the covid-19 program by The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw).

We offer

Salary Scale 11: 3808 tot 5226 euro gross when employed full-time (depending on qualifications and experience).

• In addition to a good basic salary, we also offer 8.3% end-of-year bonus and 8% holiday allowance. Do you want to know what you will earn? Calculate your net salary here (subject to change).
• Your pension is accrued with the ABP. VUmc contributes 2 / 3rd of this premium.
• We reimburse 75% of your public transport travel costs.
• An excellent environment that will support your growth as an academic researcher at the highest level.

We offer a temporary contract for 12 months.

For more information about our terms of employment, visit our website.
A screening procedure may be part of the selection procedure. Applying for a VOG (Certifi-cate of Good Behavior) is mandatory for every new employee. The application for a VOG is started by us as soon as you has been appointed as new employee.

Additional information

The starting date of this position is as soon as possible. The first interviews will be held in June. We kindly ask you to take this into account.

Information and application

Don’t hesitate to call us!
If you’re interested about this position, you can contact dr. Paul Elbers, intensivist, via telephone number +31-6-29597280.
If you need more information about the application procedure, contact Brend de Jong, corporate recruiter at +31 20 444 8704.

You can apply till 25 June 2020 by using the apply button.

Acquisition based on this vacancy is not appreciated.