Starting from September 2009, the Institute of Statistics of the Universit Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, has a vacancy for a PhD student in Biostatistics in the topic of Survival Analysis.

The position is meant to conduct research on frailty models and their application in analysis of data from clinical trials. Despite the fact that frailty models became probably the most popular model to analyse clustered survival data, very little work has been done on the choice of the frailty density. In this project, we would like to investigate further the type of dependence induced by various choices of frailty density, the impact of misspecification of this density, and aim to develop diagnostics and goodness-of- fit tests. This research has direct application to the analysis of data from multicenter survival clinical trials.