Wanted: 15 PhD students for a European partnership on functional disorders!
As of September 2021, 15 PhD students are being sought for the ETUDE program. ETUDE stands for "Encompassing Training in fUnctional Disorders arcross Europe" and is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovation Training Network which is funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020 Program). The program aims to identify underlying mechanisms of functional disorders, improve diagnosis and treatment, and reduce stigmatization of patients with functional disorders. Two of these PhD positions will be supervised in Groningen by Professor Judith Rosmalen, affiliated with the Movement Disorders Groningen Expertise Center .
Functional Disorders (FD) are clusters of chronic somatic symptoms that currently cannot be associated to reproducibly observable pathophysiological mechanisms. Functional limitations are as severe in FD as in well-defined chronic physical diseases. Direct medical costs and indirect costs as a consequence of sick leave and disability are high. However, diagnostic practices vary between fields and different concepts of FD have important consequences for patients. These challenges result in a lack of knowledge on FD, leading to fragmented and insufficient health care for patients with FD, and a society in which patients with FD experience stigma from both the society as well as from health care professionals. There is an urgent need to solve the fragmented and insufficient education and research landscape.
ETUDE aims to structurally improve health care for FD across Europe. Therefore, the goal of ETUDE is the development of a sustainable and structured training programme in order to educate a new generation of interdisciplinary creative early stage researchers that are able to cross disciplines and to translate theory and experimental models to products and services that improve care for patients. ETUDE will recruit 15 young researchers in the 10 academic and 1 non-academic institutions forming the network which are spread over six countries (Netherlands, Germany, UK, Denmark, Poland, and Italy).
Interested? Want to know more? Click here. To apply directly for one of these PhD positions, click here.