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Post Doctoral Associate at Division of Palliative Medicine Vermont Conversation Lab, University of Vermont

Country/Region : USA - United States

Website : https://www.uvm.edu

Description

Title: Post Doctoral Associate
Location: Division of Palliative Medicine (Vermont Conversation Lab)
Date Available: June 1, 2017
Responsibilities: The candidate will perform the duties of this position under the supervision of Dr. Robert Gramling. Duties will include audio and transcript data management, Machine-Learning and/or Natural Language Processing data analyses, manuscript writing, and assistance with grant writing. (Additional position description attached). The candidate will develop a focused area of research as a basis for development of an independent career. Additional areas of focus will include grant and manuscript writing, presentation skills, budgeting, and lab management.
Qualifications: Ph.D. in computer science, computational linguistics, engineering or comparable discipline
EOE/AA Statement: The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Applications from women, veterans, individuals with disabilities and people from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged.
Application Procedure: Send letter of application and curriculum vitae to Bob Gramling at robert.gramling-AT-uvm.edu
Application Deadline: Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.
Addendum
Description of the Lab: Communication is the core procedure for palliative medicine. The Vermont Conversation Lab (VCL) is focused on understanding and supporting high quality communication in serious illness. The VCL team includes multi-disciplinary scientists from University of Vermont, University of Rochester, Purdue University, University of Arizona and the University of California, San Francisco representing palliative medicine & nursing, epidemiology, linguistics, computer science, engineering and communication science.
Description of the Position: Advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine-Learning offer untapped opportunity to better understand the complex, relational and dynamic nature of clinical palliative care conversations; to measure & analyze such conversations unobtrusively and in real time; and to identify proxy indicators of high quality communication that support healthcare reform initiatives to incentivize clinical quality in palliative care settings.
We are seeking a post-doctoral researcher for a two-year position to help lead the following core Lab projects:
1) 80-90% effort on the Palliative Care Communication Research Initiative (PCCRI): The PCCRI is a multi-site cohort study funded by the American Cancer Society to understand the context, content and processes of conversations that achieve patient-centered outcomes in advanced cancer. The longitudinal cohort includes multiple sources of data, including audio-recordings and associated transcripts of palliative care consultations involving 240 hospitalized patients/families and 54 palliative care specialists. The clinical conversation dataset comprises more than 14,000 minutes of audio and over 1 million transcribed words. Enrollment, follow-up and data cleaning stages are now complete. The post-doctoral researcher would join the team at this high-yield time to help lead development of innovative NLP and/or Machine-Learning analyses of the PCCRI data, disseminate findings in scientific manuscripts and to generate follow-up NIH, NSF and foundation grant proposals.
2) 10-20% effort on the Vermont Serious Illness Care Program (SICP): The Serious Illness Care Program is a population-based intervention developed by Ariadne Labs (Harvard School of Public Health) that has demonstrated success in promoting high quality generalist palliative care. Beginning January 2018, the University of Vermont Health Network will be a Premier Implementation Site for the Serious Illness Care Program Collaborative, a national initiative partially funded by the Moore Foundation. One feature of the SICP will involve TeleConsults between patients/families and palliative care specialists. The technology required to facilitate TeleConsulting is conceptually ready for integrating real-time NLP/machine-learning communication analyses. The post-doctoral researcher will assist the Vermont SICP evaluation team with a focus on exploring proof-of-concept demonstration projects for NLP/Machine-Learning measurement of Tele-Consult communication quality. These will be the basis for grant proposals to develop this innovative application of NLP/Machine-Learning technology.
Dr. Bob Gramling, M.D., D.Sc. joined UVM in May 2016 and leads the new Vermont Conversation Lab.
Characteristics of the Successful Candidate: The ideal post-doctoral candidate will demonstrate
---strong experience with Machine-Learning, Computational Acoustic Analyses and/or Natural Language Processing methods
---excellent scientific writing skills
---creativity and internal motivation
---completion of a PhD or equivalent research doctoral degree from an accredited program in computer science, engineering, computational linguistics or related field
Salary: as per NIH standards

Last modified: 2017-06-23 05:55:07