We are looking for an enthusiastic Statistician to work within the Immunisation and Vaccine Preventable Diseases Division in Colindale at the UK Health Security Agency. The postholder will join a team focussed on assessing vaccine preventable diseases in terms of disease epidemiology, vaccine impact safety and effectiveness, laboratory methods and vaccine policy. The work is wide ranging with a focus on studies to address areas of public health concern that influence decision making on the use of vaccines in the UK. The postholder will join a small number of Statisticians within the Division and engage with other Statisticians within the Statistics, Modelling and Economics Department. The role will involve analysis of large health datasets and experience in this area, and in infectious disease epidemiology, would be ideal.

Duties Of The Job Will Include

This is permanent post with responsibilities to work across the whole range of projects that the Immunisation and Vaccine... Preventable Diseases Division is involved in. The projects that arise will involve collaboration with other divisions within the Public Health Programmes directorate and wider Agency.
• General statistical support for the scientists with the division.
• Development of study protocols and assisting with statistical content of protocols such as statistical analysis plans and sample size calculation.
• Designing studies and developing appropriate statistical methods to answer questions involving vaccine preventable diseases.
• Analysis of data from a wide range of sources, including large linked data bases such as Hospital Episodes data, mortality data, vaccine registry data, GP data and Laboratory data. This would require the use of advanced statistical methods and programming in software such as Stata or R.
• Statistical analysis report writing and writing scientific reports and peer reviewed publications
• Presenting results clearly to a wide-ranging audience including staff within the division, the wider agency, advisory committees, and international audiences (e.g. in scientific conferences).
• Keeping up to date with relevant science and statistical methodology to ensure best use of current methods. This may include advancing or adapting methods to answer public health questions.
• Contribute towards research grant applications for funding (from internal and external sources) where additional resources are required to implement a program of research.
• Management of specific projects.
• Teaching statistical methods to staff in the division.
• Managing and supervising staff as required.

Examples Of Areas Of Work Are As Follows
• Estimating effectiveness, safety and impact of COVID-19 and other vaccines in the UK. This will involve collaboration with a wide range of external groups such as the Royal College of General Practitioners Research and Surveillance Group as well as European and Global networks. This will involve dealing with large linked databases from a range of sources and being required to do rapid assessments.
• Assessing risk factors for low vaccine uptake using a variety of vaccine data sources.
• Modelling disease epidemiology using laboratory reports, GP/hospital data and sero-epidemiology.
• Analysis of clinical trial data on vaccine schedules.
• Working with the London School of Hygiene and Topical Medicine on collaborative projects.

Using your skills in complex data analysis and communication you will be part of a vibrant team working to improve public health with a focus on vaccines. You will work with the division’s senior Statistician and other staff to deliver projects to answer important questions such as “does the latest dose of Covid-19 vaccine work against the latest variant”.

You will lead some projects, whilst in others your focus may be the statistical aspects. You will work carefully with a focus on quality and completing projects in a timely way and writing up results clearly. You will develop methodology as required whilst keeping simplicity of what is needed in mind. Your analyses of vaccines will feed into wider understanding of benefits and risks of vaccines and help with mathematical modelling and costs effectiveness assessment and policy decisions.

You will programme with well written code and learn new statistical packages if needed (for example stata, R). You will listen and learn about infectious disease epidemiology and the laboratory methods used to assess the diseases. Analyses could include helping laboratory staff optimise and develop assays. You are likely to be analysing data from a GP dataset such as the Clinical Practice Research Datalink or Royal College of General Practitioners research database and from the Hospital Episode database. This will require detailed understanding of the limitations of such data and coding of outcomes.

Some projects require rapid answers when there is a urgent question and you may need to think of how to do an analysis very quickly to provide a rapid assessment whilst also planning on a more detailed assessment. This often happens with vaccine safety questions
United Kingdom

Salary Criteria