진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

Federated and interpretable clinical AI for earlier diagnosis of inborn errors of immunity

The Infection and Immunity in Paediatric Patients Research Group at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), Barcelona, is seeking an outstanding postdoctoral researcher interested in developing competitive applications for the next Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF).

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF)

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF) are part of the Horizon Europe programme and support postdoctoral researchers in developing an original research and innovation project through international mobility.

The programme aims to strengthen researchers’ careers through excellent science, international collaboration and interdisciplinary experience, while fostering integration in both academic and non-academic environments. The MSCA-PF call is highly competitive and represents an excellent opportunity to attract international talent and support researchers in consolidating their scientific careers through an ambitious mobility-based fellowship.

The 2026 call closes on 09/09/2026 (17:00 Brussels time). For candidates applying to a European Postdoctoral Fellowship, the fellowship duration is from 12 to 24 months.

Full eligibility details: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026

Background

Inborn errors of immunity (IEI) are rare, heterogeneous diseases in which diagnostic delay remains clinically relevant. Current referral pathways often depend on recognition by highly specialised clinicians or tertiary registries, which are accurate but difficult to scale and may amplify inequities in access to expert centres. At the same time, primary care and hospital electronic health records contain longitudinal signal: recurrent infections, bronchiectasis, cytopenia’s, autoimmunity, growth impairment, immunoglobulin patterns and other coded or laboratory features, that can be transformed into computable phenotypes.

The host group has developed PIDCAP, an expert-derived EHR-integrated scoring system for early identification of IEI in primary care, and is expanding this work through ontology mapping, AI-enabled clinical decision support, calculated globulin/hypogammaglobulinaemia detection, and federated learning collaborations. The proposed MSCA project will build on this platform to create generalisable, transparent and privacy-preserving methods for earlier detection of rare immune disorders in real-world health systems.

Objective

• • Develop and validate interoperable EHR phenotypes and clinical features for early suspicion of IEI, combining expert knowledge, ICD/laboratory data and ontology mapping.
• • Design interpretable prediction and risk-stratification models that can be calibrated for different clinical settings while minimising alert fatigue.
• • Implement a privacy-preserving validation strategy, including federated or distributed analytics, to assess transportability across centres or regions.
• • Evaluate clinical workflow integration, fairness and potential impact on referral pathways from primary care to specialised immunology units.

The Group

The Vall d’Hebron Research Institute Infection and Immunity in Paediatric Patients group focuses on improving the understanding, diagnosis and management of congenital errors of immunity in children. Its research combines clinical immunology, genomics, translational immunology, advanced immune monitoring and data science to support earlier and more precise diagnosis and personalised care. The group is closely linked to a highly specialised clinical unit at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and collaborates with national and international networks in primary immunodeficiencies, rare diseases, artificial intelligence and clinical data interoperability.

In parallel, the group integrates artificial intelligence tools to analyse complex clinical and biological datasets, identify predictive biomarkers and optimise diagnostic workflows. In the last year, the group reported 48 publications, 72.9% in Q1 journals, 140 citations, 12 ongoing projects and 16 active clinical trials, reflecting strong translational and collaborative activity.

Main responsibilities and duties:

• • Work closely with clinical immunologists, data scientists and health informatics teams, including the DS3 group and primary care collaborators in Catalonia.
• • Statistical learning, federated analytics, clinical NLP, ontology-driven feature engineering, or implementation science.
• • The fellow will have 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.
• • Methodological publications, validated reusable code or data models, and a roadmap for clinically safe deployment of IEI screening tools.