Phenotypic & Genotypic Determinants of Drug Response in Diabetes

Delivering Precision Medicine in Diabetes using Big Data: A global health Initiative

The NIHR Unit on Global Diabetes Outcomes Research at the University of Dundee seeks ten PhD Students with statistical and computing background. Students will be registered with the University of Dundee and will be jointly supervised by academics from the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chennai.

This PhD will expand upon the work undertaken in Dundee, Scotland to investigate differences in diabetes drug response between Asian Indians and Scottish people. Almost all studies to date have focussed on drug response in European populations with limited studies on how physiological, aetiological and genetic differences in South Asian diabetes impacts on how effective diabetes treatment is. The project will draw upon the extremely large datasets available to the newly formed Global Diabetes Outcomes Initiative and the PhD student will undertake large scale data integration and analysis, incorporating candidate based genetic approaches as well as genome wide association studies. The student will be expected to have some experience of handling large data sets and to have used statistical analysis packages such as R, STAT or SAS and/or have a knowledge of programming languages such as PERL or C++. A biological background is helpful but not essential.