Executive Summary

This pedagogic intervention seeks to combine the disciplines of Public Health Research based at WMS with Data Science Research based at WBS through an Interdisciplinary and progressive workshop series. This series will be composed of weekly 3-hour workshops and will cover a four week period. The main aim is to promote transferable research skills of the students by giving students hands on experience of analysing large related health datasets by exploiting appropriate statistical methods. More specifically, participants will be working on a wide range of freely available health datasets using R programming. R is a free programming language equipped with very powerful statistical features.

The workshop series will be delivered by a collaborative group of four PhD candidates from the Data Science Lab of Warwick Business School and the Division of Health Sciences at Warwick Medical School. All of the organisers have experience in using R and quantitative approaches during their research. This alliance was formed during the interdisciplinary workshop delivered by Dr. Nicholas Monk and Dr. Elena Riva.

Upon completion of the workshop, students are expected to be able to work on other health related big data analyses tasks confidently, procure data using online sources such as Google and Twitter, understand how to choose the appropriate statistical methods and avoid common statistical pitfalls. In the long term we foresee this workshop enabling collaborations between researchers based at WBS and the Medical School/Life Sciences. This could lead to strategic partnerships between departments and innovative research projects.