Clinical Research Fellow

Job description
Job summary

The Department of Brain Sciences is seeking to appoint a Clinical Research Fellow for 1 year to undertake a project investigating central and peripheral biomarkers of inflammation in early Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. The post is funded by the MRC as part of the Dementias Platform UK.

The study involves the recruitment and follow-up of a cohort of people with early Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia together with healthy controls, with the collection of blood and CSF biomarkers and a subset of people undergoing brain PET imaging. The study will be run jointly with Cambridge University.

Duties and responsibilities

The Clinical Research Fellow will be responsible for developing the protocol and undertaking all aspects of the study including patient recruitment, assessment and follow-up.  The post holder will be required to work as part of a research team and contribute to the design, preparation and conducting of experiments and subsequent data analysis as well as some administrative and supervisory duties. The project would suit candidates with a background in old age psychiatry, neurology or medicine and would ideally be done after a period of post-Foundation clinical training. Findings from this innovative project will accelerate our understanding of the role of peripheral and central inflammation in degenerative dementia, and provide key information on the value of biomarkers for subject stratification and predicting outcome.

You will work with the Principal Investigators (Professors Paresh Malhotra and Paul Matthews) and other investigators as well as the team based at Cambridge University (led by Professor John O’Brien). As well as sound clinical skills, ability to interact and communicate effectively with researchers and clinicians in different teams is essential. The appointee must have a medical degree and be post-Foundation, registered with the GMC and have some prior experience of clinical research, though not necessarily in this area. The appointee would work closely with clinical teams within Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and local Memory Services, and there would be the opportunity to undertake some limited clinical work.

• Contributing to study set-up
• Recruitment and clinical and cognitive assessment of a cohort of people with early Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, as well as healthy control subjects
• Obtaining biofluid samples including blood, CSF and ensuring these are processed, stored and transferred in accordance with study protocols.
• Recruiting a subset of participants for a PET brain imaging study of a novel inflammatory PET ligand, ensuring scans are successfully undertaken
• Undertaking follow-up of subjects at 18 months, including repeat biomarker assessments.
• Where necessary, entering study data into bespoke databases and contributing to data analysis (including PET scan analysis) and drafting manuscripts for publication
• Contributing to aspects of general study co-ordination and processing.

Essential requirements

This post would offer excellent research training in an outstanding and vibrant research environment to those pursuing a career in the field of dementia.

Applicants are encouraged from psychiatry, old age psychiatry, neurology, geriatric medicine or a related discipline and have or be close to obtaining MRCPsych or MRCP (or equivalent).

It is anticipated that applicants would be willing to study for a PhD or MD (unless already post-doctoral).

You will need:

• GMC registration
• Have or close to obtaining MRCPsych or MRCP (or equivalent)
• Excellent clinical skills
• Completed Foundation training
• Developing bibliography of research publications

Further information

This is a Full Time and Fixed Term post for 1 year initially which might be extended to 3 years depending on further funding.

Salary upon appointment will also include an additional London Weighting Allowance of £2,162 per annum (pro rata if applicable)

Please note, if you’re not on an approved NHS training programme you will be appointed on the Clinical staff not holding consultant contracts salary scale.

As this post is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, a satisfactory Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, at the appropriate level, will be required for the successful candidate.

Informal enquiries may be directed to Dr Paresh Malhotra at [email protected]

The College is a proud signatory to the San-Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA),which means that in hiring and promotion decisions, we evaluate applicants on the quality of their work, not the journal impact factor where it is published. For more information, see: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/about-imperial-research/research-evaluation/

The College believes that the use of animals in research is vital to improve human and animal health and welfare. Animals may only be used in research programmes where their use is shown to be necessary for developing new treatments and making medical advances. Imperial is committed to ensuring that, in cases where this research is deemed essential, all animals in the College’s care are treated with full respect, and that all staff involved with this work show due consideration at every level. http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/about-imperial-research/research-integrity/animal-research / 

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