2 PhD candidates Linking brain function and structure to phenotypes

The Institute of Psychology of the Faculty Social and Behavioural Sciences is looking for

2 PhD candidates (1.0/0.8 FTE) for the NWO funded project entitled:

Linking brain function and structure to phenotypes: does more data in fixed sample size lead to higher replicability?
Are you interested in developing and testing new statistical models for linking brain data to phenotypic measures and application of these models in the neurosciences? We are looking for two highly motivated PhD students to join the Methodology and Statistics unit (Institute of Psychology) at Leiden University. As a PhD student you will gain the skills and knowledge to conduct cutting-edge research on data science and statistics as part of an interdisciplinary team.

Applications are invited for a four-year PhD position under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mark de Rooij and Dr. Wouter Weeda, in collaboration with a team from the Methodology and Statistics unit. We are looking for an enthusiastic master student who would like to develop their career in the field of data science and statistics for brain data.

Interviews for the project will be held in the first two weeks of November 2024. Start date for the project is January 1st 2025.

Project description
A short summary of the overall project: Brain-wide association studies (BWAS) investigate the neural underpinnings of individual differences in behaviour. Recently, BWAS came under fire as these studies require huge sample sizes to be replicable. We will investigate whether the sample size requirements can be lowered when we use new (better) statistical analysis approaches. These new methods, to be developed during the project, use more data (available once the participants are scanned) and latent variables to deal with measurement error. All developed methods will be implemented in user-friendly software packages that can be freely used by the scientific community. We will test the new methods using large scale simulation studies, replicating and extending earlier studies.