The group is comprised of 6-8 postdocs and 10-15 PhD students. We have an inhouse statistician and can provide supervision in data management, programming and scientific writing. Our group has access to the world's largest electronic healthcare databases and registries such as the UK clinical practice research datalink (n=15 million), the full country of Denmark (n=5.5 million) and the PHARMO Record Linkage System. A list of publications can be found here.
All (former) PhD students are currently employed at pharmaceutical companies, academia, drug regulators, health insurance institutions, hospitals or pharmacies.
Pharmacoepidemiology studies the use of drugs and their effects in large numbers of people after market authorization. It overcomes limitations from premarketing randomised clinical drug trials (RCTs), which are not representative of patients in real life clinical care, and which do not allow studying rare (with frequencies ≥0.1%) or long-term severe side effects. Typical pharmaco-epidemiological studies use advanced epidemiological methods to study large electronic healthcare databases (EHDs) with medical records of millions of patients for effectiveness and safety of drugs. Regulatory authorities such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA) assess the risk/benefit balance of medicines to decide whether their market authorisation may be restricted or completely withdrawn. Regulatory review is supported by evidence from clinical trials and pharmacoepidemiological studies that are either published, conducted voluntary or upon the regulator´s request by manufacturers of medicines (post-authorisation safety studies [PASS]). A PASS is defined in EU Directive 2001/83/EC. PASS studies will then be assessed by the EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee , which recommends on the maintenance of the terms of the marketing authorization. This is then forwarded to the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use for final decision making.
With access to billions of medical and prescribing / dispensing records, we can address billions of research questions. To prospective students who bring their own funding, we are quit flexible to discuss details and personal goals.
Cohort studies, time-varying Cox regression analysis and occasionally case-control and drug utilization studies.
Manuscript writing, statistical programming, SAS programming, medical literature review, study design. We expect you to regularly join our journal club and provide supervision / teaching activities to other students (MSc and PhD). In contrast to most other PhD projects, our data is readily available and you can start analysing from the first day in the office, should a study protocol already have been approved.
A full PhD thesis with 6-8 original scientific articles, a general introduction and a discussion. According to recent interviews with epidemiology executives at large pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations and regulators, this training will make you perfectly suited for a role in their departments.
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Previous PhD students had completed their thesis within 1.5 - 5 years. We offer an environment in which 1.5 years is possible, should you have the right skills and attitude.
Requirements:
1. A strong foundation in epidemiology.
2. English writing, reading and speaking skills (CFER C1+ level or equivalent).
3. A background in medicine, pharmacy, epidemiology, statistics, economics or health informatics.
Preferred
1. Medical Doctor or Pharmacist by training
2. Computer programming skills, preferably SAS