Master Thesis – Epidemiology, Public Health (m/f/d)

Job Description

The BfR independently prepares expert opinions and statements on issues of food, feed and chemical safety and consumer health protection in Germany on the basis of internationally recognised scientific evaluation criteria. It advises the Federal Government and other institutions and interest groups in these areas. The BfR thus makes an important contribution to the protection of human health. You can find information on the remit of the Division here on our homepage.
The following Master thesis is available at the Unit of Epidemiology, Statistics and Exposure

Modelling of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) from July 2025:

Master Thesis:
Systematic mapping of methodology applied to animal observational studies with artificial intelligence

The Unit of Epidemiology, Statistics and Exposure Modelling is developing artificial intelligence methods to facilitate and enhance the conduct of systematic reviews. This review is a systematic map to address a critical gap in literature: the lack of systematic characterization of study designs in animal observational research. Currently, no comprehensive information exists on the application of epidemiological study designs in veterinary observational studies. Given the substantial volume of animal observational research, we aim to enhance and semi-automate the data extraction by incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence approaches.

For more information about the project, please refer to the project proposal here:
https://doi.org/10 .17605/ OSF.IO/JZH8N . The following tasks are to be worked on:

Become familiar with systematic reviews and systematic maps
Manual annotation of veterinary observational studies according to their Population, Exposure, Outcome (PEO) and Study Design
Become familiar with coding skills on R/Python
Development and validation of artificial intelligence methods to classify publications according to their PEO and Study Design categories
Categorizing studies based on their PEO and Study Design with the code you developed
Writing the first draft of the publication

Currently enrolled in a Master’s programme of Epidemiology or Public Health
Basic knowledge in observational study designs
Familiarity with concepts of systematic review
Good Knowledge of written and spoken English
A motivated and committed approach to work
We offer an interdisciplinary environment and comprehensive support directly within the team in fields of epidemiology, systematic review, machine learning and artificial intelligence.