Research Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicine (Alzheimer’s Disease)

The University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, is seeking applicants for a full-time (1.0 FTE) faculty position to be based at Harborview Medical Center (HMC). This position would have research responsibilities at Harborview Medical Center.  This position would work closely with Dr. Paul Crane, MD MPH, Dr. Shubhabrata Mukherjee, PhD, and their team focused on complex psychometric analyses.  Applied work in this lab focuses on cognition in older adults, with a focus on secondary analyses of data collected in studies focused on Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.  University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service.

This position will be at the Research Assistant Professor level (non-tenure eligible).  Research Assistant Professors are eligible for multi-year appointments that align with a 12-month service period (July 1-June 30).  Faculty with 12-month service periods are paid for 11 months of service over a 12-month period (July-June), meaning the equivalent of one month is available for paid time off.  The anticipated start date would be May 1, 2024, or earlier as administrative timelines allow.

Dr. Crane and Dr. Mukherjee have leadership roles in important national and international initiatives to modernize statistical approaches used for cognitive data across studies.  Dr. Crane serves as the lead of the Cognitive Harmonization Core for the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP) Phenotype Harmonization Consortium (ADS PHC), which is a high profile U24 Cooperative Agreement with the National Institute on Aging (NIA).  In this role, Dr. Crane, Dr. Mukherjee, and their colleagues are evaluating tens and even hundreds of thousands of data points across dozens of studies, applying modern psychometric methods to generate harmonized and co-calibrated composite scores for memory, executive functioning, language, and visuospatial.  These data are made available for genetic analyses through the ADSP.  They are also provided back to the parent studies for them to share with investigators, facilitating many analyses that could not have occurred without this work.

There are many opportunities to build on the initial success of the ADSP PHC, and the successful candidate for this position will have important roles in guiding methodological advances for subsequent analyses.  To date, we have extracted both composite scores and standard errors of those scores using frequentist approaches.  The team has published papers commenting on variation across studies in measurement precision within domains, and across domains within a study.  As a field, there are tremendous opportunities to specifically incorporate what we know about individual-level measurement precision in our analyses. 

Salary

The base salary range for this position will be: $7,500 – $9,167 per month ($90,000 – $110,004 annually), commensurate with experience and qualifications, or as mandated by a U.S. Department of Labor prevailing wage determination.