If you are a UK/EU resident interested in pursuing a PhD on estimands/causal inference in clinical trials, please see the advert here. There is (rightly) increasing emphasis in clinical trials in clear specification of the scientific question and hence target estimand or parameter.
While one might think the process of choosing and specifying the estimand is usually easy, in many settings various things can happen during follow-up which complicate this. Examples include patients changing treatments, failing from competing risks, or dying before the endpoint of interest can be measured. This has led to the ICH E9 addendum on estimands, whose final version will soon be published. There remain a number of areas where deciding what the most appropriate estimand is and how one can validly estimate it from the observable data is challenging, and this PhD will seek to address some of these outstanding areas. For more background on this area, I’d recommend reading this paper.
The PhD will be based at the University of Bath, with myself as primary supervisor. The student will benefit from additional supervision from leading researchers in causal inference: Rhian Daniel (Cardiff), Jack Bowden (Bristol) and Daniel Farewell (Cardiff).
For information about funding and the application process, please see the information here. The application deadline is 25th November 2019.