SPH Launches Population Health Data Science Program.
The cross-disciplinary program fosters innovative research collaborations, trainings, industry partnerships, and more among faculty, staff, and students across the school and university.
SPH Launches Population Health Data Science Program
The cross-disciplinary program fosters innovative research collaborations, trainings, industry partnerships, and more among faculty, staff, and students across the school and university.
As the world of big data continues to advance at a rapid rate, so too does the opportunity to better understand and improve population health. From electronic health records and wearable technology to genomic sequencing and geospatial monitoring, data science tools and methods can provide unprecedented insight into health trends and behaviors that will reduce health disparities and inequities, ultimately improving practices that shape population health.
The School of Public Health has long embraced innovative data science research across departments and disciplines. Now, SPH will elevate this critical work by launching the Population Health Data Science (PHDS) Program.
This new initiative is a cross-disciplinary program that aims to advance the development and quality of data science research in population health across the school and university. The program fosters new collaborative research among faculty, students, and other researchers from SPH, as well as Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, Goldman School of Dental Medicine, College of Arts & Sciences (CAS), College of Engineering, the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, and the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.
“This program has been purposely designed to be highly collaborative,” says PHDS Program Director Debbie Cheng, professor of biostatistics. “A unique feature of data science is that it has drawn people from a particularly broad range of disciplines—from statisticians and computer scientists to ethicists and biomedical experts across a wide range of areas. We hope to create a community of individuals who are actively working in population health data science or simply interested in learning more about it.”
Education and training opportunities are central components of the program. “Students will be a part of a community where they can meet potential mentors, learn about data science problems, and get to know trainees in other fields,” says Laura White, professor of biostatistics and associate director of the program. “Faculty, trainees, and other researchers from a variety of departments can network and collaborate through the PHDS community.”
The program will organize seminars and workshops designed to improve data science literacy and knowledge for the PHDS community. One of the program’s first events will be a seminar titled “What is Data Science?” on Thursday, June 1 at 2 p.m. The seminar will feature a presentation by Rafael Irizarry, professor and chair of the Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Future events will delve into topics such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, data visualization techniques, wearable medical technology, medical imaging analysis, and data management.
“I am excited about the many innovative approaches that now exist to help us learn from massive data sources and, I believe, will ultimately inform healthcare practice and policies,” says Cheng. “Data science gives us immense potential to draw meaningful new insights from these data sources that can benefit population health. But we need to continually learn new methodologies and expand our collaborations, all of which are wonderful growth opportunities for our students, faculty, and the school as a whole.”
“I am excited to work with the School of Public Health on the new Population Health Data Science Program,” says Azer Bestavros, associate provost for computing and data sciences at Boston University, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at CAS, founding director of the Hariri Institute, and a PHDS Program advisory board member. “I have been in active conversation about the program with Dr. Cheng since its inception, and I look forward to finding synergies between the faculty dedicated to this field and the opportunities that the PDHS Program will present. This collaboration will move us all forward to elevate the visibility of data science across the university.”
The program will also develop industry partnerships to spark collaborations that address emerging scientific questions and challenges within the field. “We hope the PHDS Program will help serve as a bridge connecting students with data science faculty and industry affiliates who can provide mentored projects and internships,” Cheng says.
“Data science and Artificial Intelligence methods, powered by very large data sets, are transforming nearly every scientific domain and industry,” says Yannis Paschalidis, Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the College of Engineering, director of the Hariri Institute, and a PDHS Program advisory board member. “The innovative data-driven research that this program will generate promises to provide evidence-based solutions to the most pressing challenges in population health.”
Early-career faculty can also take advantage of research-in-progress seminars, which will provide guidance on developing grant funding and leading manuscripts.
“Data science research has long been an integral component of the work at the School of Public Health,” says Kimberly Dukes, research associate professor of biostatistics and executive director of SPH’s Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC). “The PHDS Program will serve as a platform for creating and disseminating this critical work from established and emerging BU faculty, staff, and students as they utilize evolving technologies and systems to better track, analyze, and respond to the vast health needs of communities.”
The PHDS Program will provide flexible seed funding for population health data science projects, to help position faculty to be more competitive when applying for external funding. “We hope this will catalyze a broad range of novel data science research, such as data-driven collaborative research studies, methodological research, and the development of new tools to address big data analytics,” White says.
“The confluence of advances in high-speed computing, data storage capacity, generation of vast amounts of various ‘omics and high-density tissue imaging data, and AI/machine learning methods afford profound opportunities for elucidating a more complete understanding of the basis of complex human diseases and developing novel therapeutic approaches,” says Lindsay Farrer, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology, professor of medicine, ophthalmology, and neurology at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, and a PHDS Program advisory board member. “In order to make this happen, we need to train a new generation of scientists who can not only harness and analyze the vast amount of data, but also work in multidisciplinary teams thatinclude basic, clinical and population health investigators to design and execute new research paradigms.”
To learn more about the Population Health Data Science Program, click here.