Academic

Funded PhD Scholarship
School of Computing Sciences / School of Medicine
University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, NR4 7TJ

Data Mining a National Twin Data Set for Chronic Disease

Supervised by Dr George D Smith (School of Computing Sciences) and Prof. Alex MacGregor (School of Medicine).

Starting date: 1st September 2005

Funding: UK Arthritis Research Campaign
Students can expect funding to cover all fees together with a maintenance grant, up to an annual combined budget of �16K.

Duration: 3 years

Abstract: The lack of simple definition in complex rheumatic diseases presents an obstacle investigating their genetic basis. The aim of the project is to develop maximally informative approaches to the analysis of non-normal and multivariate data to detect the action of specific genes in data on complex rheumatic disease. The project will focus on the development of methods that simultaneously analyse detailed data on osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and other diseases of ageing collected on over 3,000 twin pairs together with genotype information. It will examine genetically informative clusters through a combination of simulated and real data approaches. The project will draw on data mining and computing resources at UEA and on the specialist statistical expertise of the Twin Research Unit, St Thomas� Hospital in London. The successful applicant will be registered in the School of Computing Sciences, UEA Norwich, England.

Experience Required:

• Degree in Computing, Statistics or allied subject.
• Good programmer (C++ or Java)
• Database experience (pref. with SQL)
• Statistics
• Data Mining (preferred)