Postdoctoral Fellowship In Infection And Immunity In Paediatric Patients

The Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) in Barcelona invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellowship under the Marie Sklodowska‑Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA‑PF) call 2026. The position is hosted by the Infection and Immunity in Paediatric Patients Research Group, which aims to improve the understanding, diagnosis and management of congenital errors of immunity in children through a blend of clinical immunology, genomics, translational immunology, advanced immune monitoring and data science.

Inborn errors of immunity (IEI) are rare, heterogeneous diseases where diagnostic delay remains a major clinical challenge. Current referral pathways rely on highly specialised clinicians or tertiary registries, which are accurate but difficult to scale and may exacerbate inequities. Electronic health records (EHR) contain longitudinal signals—recurrent infections, bronchiectasis, cytopenias, autoimmunity, growth impairment, immunoglobulin patterns—that can be transformed into computable phenotypes for early suspicion. The group has already developed PIDCAP, an expert‑derived EHR‑integrated scoring system for early identification of IEI in primary care.

The proposed MSCA project will build on PIDCAP to create generalisable, transparent and privacy‑preserving methods for earlier detection of rare immune disorders. Specific objectives include: (1) developing and validating interoperable EHR phenotypes and clinical features for early suspicion of IEI by combining expert knowledge, ICD/laboratory data and ontology mapping; (2) designing interpretable prediction and risk‑stratification models that can be calibrated for different clinical settings while minimising alert fatigue; (3) implementing a privacy‑preserving validation strategy using federated or distributed analytics to assess transportability across centres or regions; and (4) evaluating clinical workflow integration, fairness and potential impact on referral pathways from primary care to specialised immunology units.

Main responsibilities involve working closely with clinical immunologists, data scientists and health informatics teams, including the DS3 group and primary care collaborators in Catalonia. The fellow will engage in statistical learning, federated analytics, clinical NLP, ontology‑driven feature engineering, and implementation science. Access to an active clinical research environment, real‑world EHR use cases, international scientific networks in IEI and AI, and opportunities to contribute to European collaborations on interoperability, privacy‑preserving data analysis and learning health systems is provided. Expected outcomes are methodological publications, validated reusable code or data models, and a roadmap for clinically safe deployment of IEI screening tools.

The fellowship offers a competitive salary and social security benefits in accordance with MSCA‑PF rules, plus a mobility and research training grant. The successful candidate will gain valuable experience in interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and career‑enhancing training activities (e.g., conferences, workshops, secondments). The position is full‑time and based on‑site at VHIR in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Eligibility requires a PhD degree (or successful thesis defence before the call deadline of 09/09/2026), compliance with the MSCA mobility rule (not having resided or carried out main activity in Spain for more than 12 months during the 36 months preceding the deadline), a maximum of eight years of postdoctoral research experience by the deadline, and fluency in English (spoken and written). Desirable backgrounds include rare diseases, immunology, clinical epidemiology, digital health, real‑world data, health informatics or implementation science, as well as experience with EHR data, ICD/SNOMED/ORPHA/HPO/OMOP or openEHR/FHIR standards, federated learning, privacy‑preserving analytics, NLP, explainable AI, clinical decision support evaluation, or research software engineering.

Applications must be submitted viathe