Postdoctoral Fellowships
Purpose
To enable talented young doctoral graduates to obtain experience, develop skills, and publish research papers. The focus is on dietary, behavioral, and psychosocial epidemiology. This work will utilize the outstanding data available from a large cohort study, the AHS-2 cohort, with its 96,000 participants who live in all states of the U.S. and provinces of Canada.
The AHS-2 Cohort
This cohort was enrolled between 2002 and 2007 with the primary purpose of relating dietary habits to risk of different cancers among 96,000 Seventh-day Adventists. However, it also provides an opportunity to explore risk factors for a wide variety of clinical endpoints, also life expectancy. In addition, there is a Religion substudy (11,000 of the 96,000) with extensive data on religious belief and practice, psychosocial stressors and emotional dysregulation.
Methodological work is on-going relating to improved measurement of dietary intakes, physical activity measures, also methods to compensate for the biasing effects of measurement errors.
The validity of the dietary data is relatively high and results are being published. Further work is necessary on the physical activity data. Follow-up is proceeding to detect incident cancers.
Eligibility for the Fellowship
This opportunity is intended to attract relatively recent doctoral graduates (up to 5 years since completion of doctoral training), most commonly with PhD, DrPH or MD degrees. Previous work and training in epidemiology/biostatistics, or a strong quantitative background will be an important advantage.
Fellows are not required to be citizens or permanent residents, but must be eligible to work in the U.S. for the duration of the fellowship.
Mentoring
Each fellow will be assigned an experienced AHS-2 investigator as a mentor, with whom he/she will meet on a regular basis.
Duration of the Fellowships
Fellowships will be awarded on an annual basis, but with the usual expectation of a two-year duration. Short fellowships for 3 months are also available.
Financial Compensation
This will be based approximately on the published National Institutes of Health scale for postdoctoral fellows, that depends on qualifications, experience and time since doctoral training was completed. Benefits are available.
International Applicants
International applicants are welcomed, although travel expenses to and from Loma Linda are not available.
Application Process
Detailed instructions are available on contacting Hanni Bennett at 1-909-558-4753 (email: hbennett@llu.edu), or Gary Fraser MD, PhD (email: gfraser@llu.edu). This is a two-step process. Selected applicants will be invited to participate in the second step.