I'm happy to say that we're recruiting a PhD student to research methods for extracting the impact of SARS-CoV-2 mutations from the research literature. This builds upon our existing work on CoronaCentral and is an industry collaborative PhD with Biorelate. Unfortunately it is only open to UK students.
Please share with anyone you think may be interested.
FindAPhD Link: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/text-mining-the-impact-of-sars-cov-2-mutations-from-the-research-literature/?p133947
Text mining the impact of SARS-CoV-2 mutations from the research literature
Deadline: Wednesday, August 11, 2021
Supervisors:
Prof David L Robertson
Dr Jake Lever
Partner details: Biorelate (https://biorelate.com/)
PhD project summary:
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has resulted in a deluge of literature about the virus and the disease (COVID-19) it causes. Extracting relevant information from these papers has become a bottleneck for medical and life scientists alike. Gathering information on the functional role of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the experimental data describing the effect of mutations is particularly challenging. The information of specific mutations is of therapeutic importance as they may affect the virulence of the virus, enable the virus to escape the vaccine or evolve drug resistance. Hence the need for compiling this data. Fortunately, recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning can be applied to this problem. We propose to apply these advanced methodologies to the large literature knowledgebase on SARS-CoV-2 to extract biologically relevant phenotype association and experimental data. This data will be collated into a public database for use by the medical and life science community, which will feed into further experimental explorations. The study will also develop a framework for re-deployment on other viruses of pandemic potential (e.g., influenza). The student will be trained in a combination of bioinformatics, natural language processing, machine learning and programming and learn about viruses and how they evolve.
Funding Notes The studentship provides funding for tuition fees, a stipend and laboratory expenses for Home (UK) applicants only. The MRC DTP in Precision Medicine iCASE grant provides tuition fees and stipend of at least £15,285 (UKRI rate 2020/21).
Please view application information here: View Website
Once you have all the required application documentation, please apply here: View Website
