Brown held its fifth annual Love Data Week this week, featuring presentations on research data management and data services from researchers, professors and industry experts, according to the event website.
This year’s theme, “My Kind of Data,” emphasizes the personal nature of data and its potential to create a more inclusive world. Andrew Creamer, a scientific data expert at the university and organizer of this year’s conference, said the theme brought attention to precision medicine and biomedicine.
“When we were thinking about ways to reflect the theme and incorporate diversity and inclusion, we came up with precision medicine,” Creamer said.
Creamer explained that several speakers presented on the All of Us research database, which aims to “gather a more representative sample of health information from the population.”
Kickoff event for the week-long series — “Researcher Workbench Lunch and Learn for All”” — was offered in a hybrid format on Monday. Ethan Drake ’24, an environmental studies concentration who attended the presentation, said the event deepened his knowledge of the database.
Also on Monday, Frank Donnelly, director of the university’s Geographic Information Systems and Data Services Department, gave a presentation on the Ocean State Spatial Database and demonstrated its capabilities.
Thursday’s presentation, led by Jonah Bradenday, health application analyst, and Karen Crowley, health data science manager, at the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, featured an introduction to health terminology useful when analyzing health databases.
The presentation featured a healthcare common data model that “organizes data into a standard structure to facilitate data sharing and research,” according to their presentation. Bradenday and Crowley used various examples from his CDM, such as PhecodeX, to show attendees how to leverage these sources.
Kaden Bunch MD‘27 people attended the presentation to “learn how to create requests to retrieve data from hospital networks.”
“One of the greatest resources a hospital has today is medical information,” Bunch wrote in an email to the Herald. “Learning how to obtain and manipulate it will allow us to do very comprehensive research and determine relationships between different diseases and drugs.”
Future events will continue to address the theme of personal data. According to the event description, Dan Turner, assistant director of the Community Engagement Data and Evaluation Collaborative, spoke Friday about the data, evaluations, and research identified and evaluated by Rhode Island’s nonprofit and public agencies. He will lead a panel discussion on “Priorities for the World.”
Turner’s effort also aims to “strengthen Rhode Island’s existing infrastructure around data,” he said in an email to the Herald. “Our Love Data Week panel brings together a number of partners in the data community to address Rhode Island’s data priorities, from climate resiliency to housing access to digital connectivity.” I have invited you.”
Turner said the panel will discuss “how community priorities around data are defined” and how “data-centric collaboration across groups and institutions” can help strengthen community assets. It’s planned.
Creamer emphasized that despite this week’s focus on biomedical science, individuals from “all walks of life” can benefit from the event.
“Our lives, both professionally and personally, are increasingly influenced by data collection and data-based decision-making,” Turner wrote. “By taking this opportunity to reflect on our methods and collaborations with data, we can build meaningful, lasting, and mutually beneficial partnerships on and off campus.”
A complete schedule of events can be found on the Love Data Week website.
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Claire Song is a senior staff writer covering science and research. She is a freshman from California studying Applied Mathematics Biology. She likes drinking boba in her free time.
