Postdoctoral Statistician — CYP Health Analytics
Job summary
Launching in summer 2026, CADRE (the Children and Adolescents Data Resource) is being developed as a whole-population, multi-agency, longitudinal linked data platform for children and young people (CYP) aged 0-24. The platform will integrate health, social care, education and environmental data.
CADRE will be an important infrastructure project for the forthcoming Cambridge Children's Hospital (opening 2030). It will hold de-identified records for approximately one million children across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough -- with 15 years of longitudinal data -- and will expand to sites in Greater Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham. As new regions are added, analyses and model development will be conducted using privacy-preserving federated analytics.
The postholder will develop a research programme based on the data available within the broader CADRE programme with the aim of developing and answering key questions and publishing them.
This is an outstanding opportunity for a statistician wishing to play a leading role in developing a research programme at the intersection of health informatics, epidemiology, and applied machine learning.
Main duties of the job
The postholder will be an integral member of the CADRE research team, contributing to the quantitative analysis programme using the platform's pseudonymised linked dataset. Working alongside colleagues responsible for data pipeline and quality infrastructure, the postholder will focus on longitudinal and predictive analyses of CYP health, contributing to peer-reviewed publications, grant applications, and the development of a clinical risk stratification tool for early identification of CYP at risk of mental health problems prior to first contact with services.
The role is highly collaborative and will involve close working with clinical, engineering, and operational colleagues across CADRE's partner institutions, as well as with academic and NHS co-investigators. Although employed by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), the postholder will be based with the CADRE team in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, on the Addenbrooke's site. The postholder will have access to the full CADRE platform, including its Trusted Research Environment and federated analytics capability.
The postholder will join a small, expert team and, as it grows, will have access to one of the most comprehensive linked datasets for children and young people's health in the UK.
About us
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust is a health and social care organisation dedicated to providing high quality care with compassion to improve the health and wellbeing of the people we care for, as well as supporting and empowering them to lead fulfilling lives.
Our clinical teams deliver a wide range of NHS services across inpatient, primary care and community settings, including children's, adult and older people's mental health, forensic and specialist mental health, learning disabilities, primary care and liaison psychiatry, substance misuse, social care, and research and development.
To achieve our goals, we recruit high calibre candidates who share our vision and values. As an equal opportunities' employer, we welcome applications from all sections of the community, particularly under represented groups including people with long term conditions and members of our ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities.
All appointments for new employees to CPFT are subject to the successful completion of a probationary period.
Please note we reserve the right to close adverts early should we receive sufficient applications.
Regrettably, we cannot offer sponsorship for all roles. If you apply for a post that does not attract sponsorship, your application will be withdrawn from the process.
For further information on CPFT, please visit our website at https://www.cpft.nhs.uk
Job description
Job responsibilities
Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of responsibilities.
Working with data prepared and quality-assured by the CADRE data engineering team, the postholder will contribute to longitudinal analyses of the cohort, including: Describing the cohort at index event (first contact with health, education, or social care services), including individual characteristics, service type, assessment outcomes, diagnoses, and severity measures. Estimating the prevalence and incidence of diagnoses and identified needs longitudinally, and examining how these differ across health and care settings. Conducting time-to-event analyses examining delays to diagnosis or treatment following initial presentation. Measuring candidate risk and protective factors, exploring sub-group structure and clustering. Exploring relationships between variables and carrying out feature engineering steps required to support predictive modelling.The postholder will develop and validate predictive models aimed at: Modelling future risk of mental health problems in CYP prior to contact with mental health or social care services. Identifying early signs of existing mental health problems within routinely collected multi-agency data. Exploring optimal intervention matching based on identified need profiles. Comparing and evaluating traditional statistical approaches (e.g. multi-level regression, generalised linear models, survival analysis) alongside machine learning and AI methods, selecting approaches appropriate to the research question and data structure. Prepare high-quality manuscripts for peer-reviewed publication across statistical, clinical, and public health journals. Contributing to the development of a validated risk stratification tool suitable for integration into clinical pathways and for use as an enrichment strategy for randomised controlled trials.
Person Specification
Education / Qualifications
- PhD in a quantitative discipline relevant to health data science (e.g. epidemiology, biostatistics, computer science, mathematics, public health, or a clinical discipline with strong quantitative training). Ideally with 4+ years' postdoc experience.
Experience
- Experience analysing large, complex, routinely collected health datasets (e.g. electronic health records, administrative data, or multi-agency linked data)
- Demonstrated experience with SQL and working with relational databases
- Strong grounding in epidemiological methods, including cohort analysis, prevalence and incidence estimation, and longitudinal study design
- Experience with statistical modelling (e.g. multi-level regression, generalised linear models, time-series or survival analysis)
- Understanding of UK health data infrastructure (e.g. NHS datasets, OMOP CDM, SAIL, CPRD)
- Experience working with children and young people's health, education, or social care data
- Familiarity with Trusted Research Environments (TREs), safe havens, or other secure data access frameworks
- Applied experience with machine learning and/or AI approaches for prediction or classification in health data contexts
Knowledge & Skills
- Proficiency in Python and/or R to a high standard
- Experience with version control (e.g. Git) and collaborative code environments
- Ability to communicate complex analytical findings clearly to clinical, research, operational, and non-technical audiences
- Strong scientific writing skills evidenced by peer-reviewed publication, pre-prints or submitted manuscripts
- Ability to construct, document, and maintain analytical pipelines for large datasets
- Experience with federated analytics, privacy-preserving analytical methods, or distributed data environments (e.g. Bitfount, DataSHIELD, or similar platforms)
- Ability to work collaboratively within a multidisciplinary team, including peer working with other postdoctoral researchers and contributing to the supervision of research assistants and postgraduate students
- Experience presenting at academic or professional conferences
Personal Qualities
- Self-motivated and able to manage own workload and timelines within a fast-paced research environment
- Commitment to rigorous, reproducible, and ethically conducted research
- Enthusiasm for translational research with direct impact on children's health and wellbeing
- Communicates effectively and appropriately with senior management, external partners and with people at all levels across the University and outside the University in the wider community
- Supports, promotes and implements change; encourages the adoption of new methods and overcomes barriers to acceptance
- Encourages and facilitates the learning and development of others; demonstrates enhancement of individual and team potential through giving clear direction, guidance and feedback on performance
- Develops and maintains existing partnerships; identifies means of enhancing team effectiveness
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
Certificate of Sponsorship
Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website.
From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants.
Employer details
Employer name
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
Address
CADRE Team - Department of Psychiatry
University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke’s site
Cambridge
CB2 0SZ
United Kingdom
Employer's website
https://www.cpft.nhs.uk/