PhD opportunity at Ingenio (CSIC) / Open Univ. Catalonia
One 4-year PhD studentships in the project “Mapping Mental Health Research against Needs”
A 4-year PhD studentship (2019-2023) is available within the project “Mapping Mental Health Research against Needs” (MapaMent) conducted by Ismael
Ràfols at Ingenio (CSIC, an institute of science policy studies) and Paula
Adam at AQuAS (the public Catalan Agency for Health Quality and Assessment).
The PhD student will enrol in the programme Information and Knowledge Society Doctoral Programme of UOC (the
Open University of Catalonia), where he will be co-supervised by Marta Aymerich (vice-rector for research and member of the eHealth
Centre) and Ismael Ràfols (CSIC).
If interested, please contact firstname.lastname@example.org. es as soon as possible (preferably by October
MapaMent aims develop methods for
priority setting in health research in the area of mental health. The
goal is to build methodologies that inform resource allocation in health
research on the basis of three
sources of evidence:
- perceptions and values of stakeholders on health needs and research priorities,
- evidence of health needs obtained from new digital healthcare data,
- evidence of current research priorities obtained from publication and funding data.
This approach is a response to the
perception that research is not sufficiently contributing to improving
welfare. Mental health is an issue with a major social burden, in which
there is an ongoing public and plural debate
on preferred research trajectories.
To address the perceived misalignment
between research and needs, we aim to develop a priority setting
strategy that exploits newly available big data on healthcare and on
scientific activities and that uses, in parallel,
wider forms of expertise through public participation. Such approaches
are in agreement with wider science policy initiatives in Europe on
‘Open Science’ and ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI), as well
as the ‘Evaluation System for Research in Health’
of Catalonia (SARIS). The comprehensive methodology will be built
combining techniques from participatory research from science and
technology studies, health needs and cost estimates from health
economics, and on science mapping techniques from big data analysis.
The project is unique in bringing together
highly transdisciplinary expertise from a science policy institute,
Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), and a health policy agency (AQuAS) that are among
the leading centres in the study and application
of research impact assessment. It will build on ongoing collaborations
with European centres on innovation policy, namely CWTS ( University
of Leiden) and SPRU (University of Sussex).
Possible PhD topics:
Depending on the profile, interests and
creative ideas of candidates, the PhD research can be focused to
different degree on participatory or qualitative approaches to capture
stakeholders perceptions, or on data analysis
building on access to AQuAS healthcare data (PADRIS) and scientometrics. In any case, we expect
the student to engage with policy-driven questions, and to combine disparate research methods in addressing them (see e.g. Wallace
and Rafols, Research Policy 2018).
- A 4 year full-time contract contract with associated benefits (social security, etc.), employed by Ingenio (CSIC) (20,453 euro per year before taxes).
- Tuition fee at the UOC (Open University of Catalonia)
- Additional research and training related costs will be covered (for example, conferences, workshops, fieldwork, equipment)
- Applicants should have a good Masters degree. Open to any type of previous degree – including natural, social sciences and humanities.
- Fluency in oral and written English.
- Interested for mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. If you are strong on some, you should have motivation to learn others.
- Fluency in oral and written Catalan and Spanish may be relevant assets to interact with stakeholders and conduct case studies, depending on focus of project.
Relevant skills (not all required):
- Qualitative research methods in science and technology studies such as participatory research and Interviews
Data collection, processing and analytical skills in public health, science policy or STS
- Database management
- Experience with programming languages such as SQL, Python or R
- Network analysis and visualisation tools
- It is expected to start between January and September 2019