HDR UK Alumni Network

About the Alumni Network

Our Alumni Network is developing into a lively forum to meet your peers, find collaborators, get advice and learn about career opportunities.

The LinkedIn-based group aims to provide a free, member-led single network where they can share ideas, opportunities and information. Anyone who has been part of one of HDR UK’s internships, post-graduate degrees, or fellowships is eligible to join – along with early career health data scientists who are part of our research community.

The network is co-ordinated by James Godwin, an HDR UK Master’s Programme graduate, and Phinehas Arkorful, who was part of the 2022 Black Internship Programme.

“Health data science and HDR UK are relatively new in the science world and it would be great if current students, alumni and professionals had a place to come together and build networks – create the sort of community that other areas of science have.” James Godwin, Alumni Network co-ordinator and PhD student at the University of York.

“The Alumni Network is a chance to bring people together to talk and exchange ideas and to get advice. We can achieve a great deal if we create a pool of health data scientists who want to work together.” Phinehas Arkorful, Alumni Network co-ordinator and Teeside University Applied Data Science MSc student.

The hope is that the Alumni Network will become a valuable network linking health data scientists nationally and internationally.

Meet HDR UK’s amazing alumni

Our alumni are achieving remarkable things – often with established or emerging careers that are pushing back the frontiers of healthcare. We are profiling profiling some of their inspirational stories. The first alumnus we’d like to introduce is HDR UK Fellow Dr Rona Strawbridge – a geneticist who is revealing the connections between physical and psychiatric illness. Read about her here.

Then there’s Ben Pitter-Fagan, a former maths teacher who joined our Black Internships programme and has now launched an exciting new career.

Another Black Internships Programme alumnus is Fewa Laleye, who is now undertaking PhD research using clinical data and biological information for research aimed at helping predict which women are at risk of pre-term births.

And there are our current learners, who are also eligible to join the network, such as Claire Coffey who is part of the HDRUK-Turing Wellcome PhD programme. She is among the emerging generation of health data scientists who are already helping transform healthcare for the better.

• If there is an HDR UK alumnus – or current learner – whose story you think we should be sharing email us at alumni@hdruk.ac.uk.

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