The NIHR Research Design Service, Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), the MRC Regulatory Support Centre, NHS England Research Advisory Group and NHS Digital are organising the sixth in a series of virtual researcher roadshows.

This free-to-attend event is aimed at researchers and others working with health and social care datasets who would like to increase their understanding of roles of health data scientists and value of health data science.

It will bring together health data scientists from the NHS, academia, and industry and provide insights and perspectives on the important work they do.

The roadshow will include presentations on different methods and approaches used by health data scientists, followed by a panel discussion about careers in the sector. 

Register here

Recordings of previous Researcher Roadshows can be viewed here.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact: rsc@mrc.ukri.org

    • Welcome and introductions (10:00-10:05) 
      • Martin Williams (NIHR)
    • Methods of health data scientists: (10:05-10:50)
      • Fionna Chalmers (BHF Data Science Centre)
      • Watjana Lilaonitkul (UCL)
    • Panel discussion – Health data science careers (10:50-11:55)
      • Chair: Andrew Boyd (University of Bristol, UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration)
      • Palwasha Khan (LSHTM)
      • Richard Savage (Pinpoint)
      • Zoe Turner (NHS-R)
    • Event close (11:55-12:00)
      • Martin Williams (NIHR)

  • Fionna Chalmers – BHF Data Science Centre 

    Health data science is an exciting and constantly evolving area, which means that data scientists in the field must be committed to continuously learning new methods and techniques.

    Fionna, an Early Career Health Data Scientist working within the BHF Data Science Centre, will talk about a recent piece of work she undertook and her approach to staying curious and learning new data skills.

    She will discuss the tools she uses to solve a variety of problems and how the BHF DSC use a team science approach to improve health with open source, reproducible, research.

    Waty Lilaonitkul – UCL

    AI applications in health and healthcare have demonstrated human-level performance across various medically related tasks but have yet to show real-world impact in practice.

    In this talk, Dr Waty Lilaonitkul will discuss her work on building human-in-the-loop AI pipelines in collaboration with healthcare practitioners.

    This collaboration aims to create an agile design-train-test loop in technology development via new algorithms to concurrently optimise performance and robustness in data-starved environments. By iteratively combining the best of human and machine intelligence to force more efficient learning paths, machines are able to actively learn better features from fewer training examples at significantly faster rates.

    As case-in-point, she will discuss (i) PKPDAI.com, an opensource AI-backed system that automatically ‘machine-reads’ publications to continuously extract and grow a pharmacokinetic database across all drugs to support AI research in drug development, and (ii) AI4IRDs, a pipeline for multimodal research in rare diseases, which has yielded 3 patent-applications.

    Panel discussion 

    The Researcher Roadshow panel, chaired by Andy Boyd (University of Bristol, UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration), will introduce themselves and their varied routes into health data science. The panel will discuss pathways into health data science careers and there will be a large amount of time in this session dedicated to audience questions.