Research Associate in Computational Tools for Cardiovascular Digital Twins

**Job Description**:
**Job Title**:Research Associate in Computational Tools for Cardiovascular Digital Twins

**Posting Start Date**:12/08/2025

**Job Id**:1319

**School/Department**:Computer Science

**Work Arrangement**:Full Time (Hybrid)

**Contract Type**:Fixed-term

**Salary per annum (£)**:£38,249-£45,735

**Closing Date**:21/09/2025

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world-class university.

We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more.

**Overview**
- This position is funded as part of an £8M EPSRC programme grant “Networks of Cardiovascular Digital Twins (CVD-Net)”, which is jointly held by Imperial College London, the Universities of Sheffield and Nottingham, and the Alan Turing Institute. The wider focus of this research programme is to develop both physics-based and data-driven models of heart function and blood flow through the cardiovascular system that are personalised to individual patients and updated whenever new data from wearable and implanted sensors are available. This post will focus on using these agile and personalised digital twins to forecast the disease trajectories of individual patients, and to assess the value of model-based forecasting over purely data based methods.

**Main duties and responsibilities**Develop methods to forecast the progression of pulmonary arterial hypertension, using personalised cardiovascular system models and healthcare data.-
- Work collaboratively with the CVD-Net team to develop, establish, and maintain cohorts of cardiovascular digital twins, and to develop and implement novel methods for calibration and updating of these digital twins from patients data.-
- Implement computational models within a framework that adheres to good research software engineering practice.-
- To operate at all times within the governance and ethics framework that applies to personal patient data.-
- Attend regular research meetings, collaborate, and communicate with other researchers to ensure overall progress is maintained.-
- Work collaboratively with other investigators and researchers in the team to identify priorities and timescales for different aspects of the research; in particular to specify, develop, and curate computational tools.-
- Manage workload in order to meet deadlines, completing tasks on time and to a high standard, and working throughout with scientific rigour and integrity.-
- Maintain up-to-date knowledge of the relevant literature, technologies, and state-of-the-art.-
- Plan own research activities in discussion with the supervisor team, incorporating factors such as the availability of resources, deadlines, project milestones and overall research aims.-
- Write and contribute to research papers for publication in high quality peer-reviewed journals, and give presentations at workshops and conferences.-
- Travel to other centres involved in the programme for meetings and work visits as required.-
- Carry out other duties, commensurate with the grade and remit of the post**Person Specification**

**Criteria**

**Essential or desirable**

**Stage(s) assessed at**
- A PhD degree (or close to completion of a PhD) in a relevant field of study, for example Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or Statistics (or equivalent experience).**Essential**
- Application- **Essential**
- ApplicationExcellent programming skills in Python, Julia or similar, including scientific computing and code curation.**Essential**
- Interview / Application- **Desirable**
- Interview/ ApplicationExperience of model based probabilistic forecasting.**Desirable**
- Interview / ApplicationA track record of experience working with cardiac and/or cardiovascular system models.**Essential**
- ApplicationEffective communication skills, both verbal and written.**Essential**
- Interview / ApplicationPeer-reviewed publications in relevant conferences/journals.**Desirable**
- ApplicationAbility to work effectively as part of a multidisciplinary research team that includes clinicians.**Essential**
- Interview / ApplicationAbility to assess and organise resources, solve problems, and plan and progress work activities to meet key project deadlines.**Essential**
- Interview**Further Information**

**Grade**

**7**

**Salary**

**£38,249-£45,735**

**Work arrangement**
- Full-time**Duration**
- 3 years**Line manager**
- Professor Richard Clayton and Dr Xu Xu**Direct reports**
- None**Our website**
**Next steps in the recruitment process**

**Our vision and strategic plan**
- We are the University of Sheffield. This is our vision: sheffield.ac.uk/vision ().

**What we offer**- A minimum of 41**days annual leave