Clinical Research Informatics Unit Clinical Informatics Software Developer (Senior Research Fellow)

Vacancy ref: 1815827

The Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Clinical Research Informatics Unit (CRIU) is a partnership between University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) and University College London (UCL). It was established in 2017 to provide a robust environment for the analysis of clinical data with the ultimate aim to facilitate Electronic Health Record (EHR)-embedded clinical decision support, optimise patient care and operational performance through data-driven innovation, and foster excellence in research at one of the world’s leading teaching hospitals. 

The CRIU team is expanding, with multiple opportunities being available for Data Scientists, AI Researchers and Software Developers with expertise in NLP and Imaging, as well as Clinical Fellows to perform pragmatic EHR clinical trials within our EPIC system.

Applications are invited for a Clinical Informatics Software Developer to work within a vibrant multidisciplinary informatics team and play a leading role in an exciting and ground-breaking project to harness EHRs for real-time tailored care, trial recruitment and research at UCLH. The post-holder will be involved in the design, development and managing of enterprise software projects based on the CogStack Platform working on NHS clinical records data.

Key requirements

You will have a strong background in one or more relevant disciplines, including: natural language processing, software development, bioinformatics, clinical, biomedical, health informatics and computer science. You will draw on the wealth of research excellence and translational experience brought together in UCL Partner organisations and will foster the development of an exciting culture of translational science.

The post-holder will:

• Develop, test, deploy and maintain a new scalable platform for information extraction and retrieval from NHS electronic health record systems.
• Produce innovative NLP applications (e.g. based on SpaCy, GATE, NLTK) for extraction of insights from clinical record documents and other unstructured data sources using established frameworks.
• Integrate modern search engine technologies (e.g. ElasticSearch) with structured data and annotations derived with NLP methods.
• Assist with the development of research and clinical business intelligence tools build on top of the information retrieval/extraction platform (microservices, Docker).
• Assist with developing methods for harmonization and curation of health data from diverse data sources using established open source solutions and standards.
• Work closely with the software development team and subscribe to and develop good programming practices, such as Agile (scrum), Continuous Integration, Extreme Programming, Pair Programming and Test Driven Development.
• Develop data pipelines (e.g., using Spring, Apache NiFi) for transforming raw data into research-ready data and implement data cleaning, harmonization, de-identification and standardization operations.
• Develop analysis and visualisation tools for characterizing heterogeneous data sources and presenting the summaries to non-technical audiences such as clinicians.
• Build algorithms for phenotyping electronic health records and work with clinicians on implementing decision support and business intelligence tools.

Additional information

If you would like an informal discussion about this post, please contact Professor Richard Dobson (r.dobson@ucl.ac.uk) or Dr Lukasz Roguski (l.roguski@ucl.ac.uk)

If you have any queries regarding the vacancy or the application process, please contact IHI HR at ihi.hr@ucl.ac.uk.

Latest time for the submission of applications: 19^th August 2019 23:59

Interview Date: TBC

UCL Taking Action for Equality

We will consider applications to work on a part-time, flexible and job share basis wherever possible. We encourage applications from all sections of the community regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or disability. Our department holds an Athena SWAN Bronze award, in recognition of our commitment to advancing gender equality. For a job description and person specification, please refer to the attached document.