The Children's Lung Health team at Telethon Kids aims to improve lung health in children with asthma, neuromuscular disease, cystic fibrosis, following preterm birth and Aboriginal lung health. For this project, the aim is to create personalised prediction scores for the development of asthma and allergy using machine learning, which will help in better understanding, preventing and managing asthma.

This PhD scholarship program is a unique opportunity for an exceptional postgraduate student with either formal training in statistics / data science or relevant experience in data analysis to undertake advanced studies in asthma research.

The Role:

Asthma is the most common chronic lung disease of childhood. In Western Australia, nearly 9% of children report having a doctor diagnosis of asthma. Asthma diagnosis is difficult in young children. Therefore, there has been a worldwide effort to develop ways to identify asthma risk as early as possible in order to prevent disease. This project aims to show that asthma and allergies in individuals can be predicted before it occurs based on individual family history and information on the early environment.

The student will receive supervision from experienced bioinformaticians and data scientists to create personalised prediction scores for the development of asthma and allergy by using machine learning, which will help in better understanding, preventing and managing asthma.

Please submit a cover letter addressing the following selection criteria:

• Have an Honours degree or equivalent in statistics or other data analysis qualifications
• Eligible to enrol in a PhD at an Australian University
• Self-management and high personal motivation
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Knowledge of a programming language (preferably R, Python or related data analysis and machine learning tools)
• Some experience with the UNIX computational environment and/or cloud computing

A full scholarship is available to support your studies and we are seeking students who can potentially begin immediately.