The Cancer Research UK-funded Prostate International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) project has generated a large amount of molecular data in order to address questions of clinical relevance such as i) distinguishing aggressive from indolent disease (ii) determining in which cases focal therapy would be appropriate (iii) determining why there are ethnic differences in prostate cancer incidence (iv) mining for new drug targets (v) mining data for new biomarkers. These data include, but are not restricted to, whole-genome sequencing data, RNA-sequencing, methylation sequencing, small RNA sequencing, and protein profiling along with clinical and pathology data.

In many cases we have profiled multiple loci within a cancerous prostate and this post will be primarily focussed on improving our understanding of the heterogeneity within such a tumour across multiple dimensions of data in order to draw out new understanding of the disease that will aid in answering the clinical objectives. The development of new methods would be a welcome part of the project, but intelligent application of existing methods developed for other projects may also form the basis for these analyses.

This ICGC project is a collaboration between PIs at the Institute of Cancer Research, Cambridge, Norwich, Oxford, St Andrews and Tampere. The UK project is also part of the international Pan Prostate Cancer Group (http://panprostate.org) that is seeking to assemble and analyse genomic and transcriptomic data for a cohort of thousands of men with prostate cancer, in order to overcome the heterogeneity inherent in the disease.

This post will be based in the Statistical Medicine and Molecular Biology research group (https://sites.google.com/view/smmb/home) in the Statistics Division of the School of Mathematics and Statistics (www.st-andrews.ac.uk/maths) at the University of St Andrews.

The University is committed to equality for all, demonstrated through our working on diversity awards (ECU Athena SWAN/Race Charters; Carer Positive; LGBT Charter; and Stonewall). More details can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/edi/diversityawards/.

School of Mathematics & Statistics

Salary: £33,797 - £40,322 per annum

Fixed Term: 24 months

Start: As soon as possible