Internship in Epidemiology & Physical Activity (Master students only)

The Physical Activity, Sport and Health (PASH) research group aims to improve knowledge on the beneficial effects of physical activity on individuals’ health with and without disease and of any age, as well as on the mechanisms leading to the development of sports injuries.

Dr. Laurent Malisoux, PhD, head of this research group, and Dr. Berta Portugal, PhD, postdoctoral researcher, are seeking a Master’s student for the MOBEDIS project, which aims to go beyond the unidimensional assessment of physical activity using a holistic approach to describe movement behaviours profiles and their relationships with some chronic diseases. The student will be responsible to study the relationship between daily step volume and intensity with cardiometabolic diseases, using data from the UK Biobank, a prospective population-based cohort study. Approximately 100 000 participants used Axivity AX3 accelerometers on the dominant wrist for 7 consecutive days between 2013 and 2015. The raw accelerometer data was subsequently processed using the GGIR R-package to classify step volume and intensity. Cardiometabolic diseases have been ascertained based on self-report, primary care, hospital inpatient data and death register.

The student will be responsible for the literature review, data management, compute meaningful step-based physical activity metrics and conduct quantitative data analysis (e.g. cox proportional hazard models). This internship provides a great opportunity to learn more about objectively measured physical activity and non-communicable diseases. The student will have the opportunity to improve coding abilities in R or Stata, quantitative analysis, as well as scientific writing.

Key Accountabilities

• Literature review on step count analysis.
• Perform data management. 
• Select and compute step-based physical activity metrics.
• Perform descriptive statistics.
• Apply longitudinal analysis (i.e., Cox proportional hazard regression models).
• Discuss results within the group & other researchers. 
• Participate in project meetings & give presentations.

Key Skills, Experience and Qualifications

• Master level in Sports Sciences, Epidemiology, Public Health, or comparable.
• Good statistical knowledge and hands-on experience with statistical programs (R or STATA).
• Good organisational skills.
• Excellent planning and communication skills, ability to work in complex, multi-disciplinary teams and to coordinate work.
• Sense of responsibility, autonomy, curiosity, flexibility and respect of confidentiality.
• Good proficiency in English (written & oral). Any other language in use in Luxembourg would also be an asset (French, German, or Luxembourgish).