The NIH Big Data to Knowledge program is pleased to announce the BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science, a series of online lectures given by experts from across the country covering a range of diverse topics in data science. This course is an introductory overview that assumes no prior knowledge or understanding of data science.

The series starts Friday, September 9th and will run all year once per week at 9:00-10:00 AM PST. No registration is required.

***To join the meeting, view the login information here.
***First GoToMeeting? Try a test session.

This is a joint effort of the BD2K Training Coordinating Center (TCC), the BD2K Centers Coordination Center (BD2KCCC), and the NIH Office of the Associate Director of Data Science. For more information about the series and to see archived presentations, visit the main site.

Schedule
9/9/16: Introduction to big data and the data lifecycle (Mark Musen, Stanford).
9/16/16: SECTION 1: DATA MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW (Bill Hersh, Oregon Health Sciences).
9/23/16: Finding and accessing datasets, Indexing and Identifiers (Lucila Ohno-Machado, UCSD).
9/30/16: Data curation and Version control (Pascale Gaudet, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics).
10/7/16: Ontologies (Michel Dumontier, Stanford).
10/14/16: Provenance(Zachary Ives, Penn).
10/21/16: Metadata standards (Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Oxford).

10/28/16: SECTION 2: DATA REPRESENTATION OVERVIEW (Anita Bandrowski, UCSD).
11/4/16: Databases and data warehouses, Data: structures, types, integrations (Chaitan Baru, NSF).
11/11/16: No lecture — Veteran’s Day.
11/18/16: Social networking data (TBD).
12/2/16: Data wrangling, normalization, preprocessing (Joseph Picone, Temple).
12/9/16: Exploratory Data Analysis (Brian Caffo, Johns Hopkins).
12/16/16 Natural Language Processing (Noemie Elhadad, Columbia).

The following topics will be covered in January through May of 2017:

SECTION 3: COMPUTING OVERVIEW
Workflows/pipelines
Programming and software engineering; API; optimization
Cloud, Parallel, Distributed Computing, and HPC
Commons: lessons learned, current state

SECTION 4: DATA MODELING AND INFERENCE OVERVIEW
Smoothing, Unsupervised Learning/Clustering/Density Estimation
Supervised Learning/prediction/ML, dimensionality reduction
Algorithms, incl. Optimization
Multiple testing, False Discovery rate
Data issues: Bias, Confounding, and Missing data
Causal inference
Data Visualization tools and communication
Modeling Synthesis

SECTION 5: ADDITIONAL TOPICS
Open science
Data sharing (including social obstacles)
Ethical Issues
Extra considerations/limitations for clinical data
Reproducible Research
SUMMARY and NIH context

This fall, in partnership with the Climate Impacts Group, Urban@UW will host a symposium to launch a university-wide engagement with the complex issues of environmental and climate justice in the context of urbanization and city growth and decline.

The event will use the symposium to engage in discussions on how communities are drawing on environmental and climate science to advocate for justice, how human and environmental health are linked in a just city, and how individuals can bring these issues to classrooms and academic communities. More details will be added soon!

For more than 150 years, the University of Washington has been a place where the imagination thrives. New discoveries are made every day in laboratories across campus, where faculty, staff and students work together to tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems. Many of the challenges confronting people today in areas such as climate, disease and health care require fundamental discovery-based research that is novel in its approach and has the ability to break open new territory in a field. The University of Washington Innovation Awards will fuel innovative research that addresses problems of humanity.

Innovation Research Awards seeded through existing gift funds from the President’s office are to support unusually creative early and mid-career faculty in health, natural, social and engineering sciences. Innovative discovery-based individual research or smaller scale collaborative research projects will be supported rather than extensions of large-scale ongoing research programs. The goal is to foster high-payoff work that promises to be transformational but for which other funding sources are limited.

The Innovation Awards will encourage, nurture, bring together, and celebrate creative thinkers in the area. A second purpose of the Innovation Awards is to increase public awareness of academic innovation in hopes of stimulating philanthropic support for additional innovation awards.

Innovation Research awards will be made each year in selected areas that will be rotated each year. For FY 17, awards will be available in the biomedical sciences and in the life sciences. Applications that address any fundamental problem in the biological sciences, including biomedical problems that have clear relevance to human health, are welcome. Applications with a focus on the environmental, engineering or physical sciences will not be considered, as these were the selected area of focus for the FY16 innovation awards. Preference for these awards will be given to Assistant and recently promoted Associate professors. Awards are open to Faculty members from each of the three University of Washington Campuses. Award recipients are expected to publish their results in appropriate journals and give talks on and off campus.

Selection Process

• Innovation Research award criteria: highly innovative, potentially transformational research proposals. Preference will be given to Assistant and Associate Professors.  Research Faculty are eligible to apply.
• Funding: Innovation Research awards will be up to $250K/yr x 2 years.
• Proposal: A two-step process
  • Step 1: Email the following materials as a single PDF to research@uw.edu:
    • Project Summary (1 page maximum)
      • Abstract: Provide an executive summary of this project, including overall goal, methodology and significance for a well-educated lay audience.
      • Unique Aspects: Describe unique or distinctive aspects of this project. How will the project break open new territory in your field? How will it lay the foundation for a solution to a real world problem?
      • Principal Investigator: Provide a brief description of expertise.
    • Project Description (3 page maximum)
      • Overview: Provide an overview of this field and the need for this project.
      • Relevant Efforts: Describe past and current efforts that are relevant to this project.
      • Goals and Methodology: State the major goals of this project and summarize the methodologies and time frame to be used in achieving them.
      • Impact: Describe the potential impacts of achieving these goals. How will results, resources, or best practices be disseminated?
    • 3-page CV citing up to 10 most relevant publications and list of active grants.
    • 1-page description of how your research accomplishments and/ or personal characteristics provide evidence of innovation or creativity.
    • 1 page budget that includes the following budget categories: salaries and wages; benefits; materials and supplies; equipment; travel; contractual services; other services. Indirect costs will not be charged.

Questions should be directed to Matt Orefice, Assistant Director, at research@uw.edu.

The University of Washington’s Master of Public Health (MPH) and Master of Science (MS) programs in Health Services are actively recruiting students for admission for the fall of 2017.

The MPH program in Health Services consistently ranks among the best in the nation. The goal of our program is to prepare leaders to improve health in diverse populations by solving problems in rapidly changing societies and health systems.

The MPH in Health Services is a 2-year graduate degree program that offers analytical and practical knowledge and skills to candidates who have some experience in health fields and who want to assume positions of greater responsibility in improving the public’s health and the effectiveness of health care and population health services. The curriculum is exceptional in the strength of its required and elective courses in research methods, health care systems, health economics, health promotion, and the social determinants of health. Students can pursue optional concentrations in Health Systems and Policy, Maternal and Child Health, and Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The program’s more than 70 core faculty members and more than 200 clinical, affiliate, and adjunct faculty members are skilled in interdisciplinary research and practice and are able to mentor students with a large diversity of educational backgrounds and training interests. It has more than 1,000 alumni, many of whom are leaders in academia, government agencies, and the private sector. Several alumni have pursued the PhD Program in Health Services or advanced study in a related field.

The MS degree program is often chosen by physicians and post-doctoral fellows and is sometimes undertaken as the first step toward a doctorate in Health Services.

The application deadline for the MPH and MS programs is January 1, 2017. Please do not hesitate to contact Lauren Brackenbury with any questions.

The Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW) Seattle seeks an ethnographer of data science for a 36-month postdoctoral research scientist position, starting January 2017.

The hired candidate will work with Prof. David Ribes in Seattle, and in collaboration with Geoffrey C. Bowker (and an additional postdoc) at the UC Irvine School of Informatics. The postdoc will collaborate in the investigation of the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs and Spokes program (BDHubs), an NSF funded “umbrella organization” for US Big Data and data science. The project will investigate the ongoing activities at the BDHubs and its partner institutions, study their emerging plans for the future, and tie these to the history of research infrastructures. The goal is to understand the rise and institutionalization of the “data sciences,” including organizational, methodological, epistemological and infrastructural transformations at the nexus of science, industry and state.

The ideal candidate will be trained in the social and/or information sciences and have a grasp of the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS); have good communication skills; have a strong background in qualitative methods; and be able to navigate a highly interdisciplinary field of investigation. Additional methodological skillsets welcome!

At UW, the postdoc will be encouraged to engage with a variety of related investigations of big data and data science by scholars in HCDE, the iSchool, ethnographers at the eScience Institute, and the broader Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) network.

Review of applicants begins October 1st 2016 and the position will remain open until filled. To apply, please submit:

1. A brief letter;
2. A curriculum vita;
3. A sample of scholarly work; and
4. The names of two university faculty members who can serve as referees (no letters of recommendation required).

Specific questions regarding the research profile of the position should be addressed to David Ribes (dribes@uw.edu).

Health in urban areas has played a major role in determining trajectories of demographic growth, economic success and individual and community well-being across time. However, the relationship between health and urban space has not been constant over either time or place. Before the early twentieth century, towns and cities suffered a probably universal urban mortality penalty, and in some periods acted as “demographic sinks,” characterized by high death rates largely due to air and water-borne infections. The improvement of urban environments, together with the development of better preventive and curative medical services which tend to be based in cities, means that urban areas today have lower mortality than their surrounding areas. Although the decline of mortality in urban areas has been studied, there is little consensus about how urban spaces were transformed from unhealthy to healthy places. Such changes are unlikely to have happened at the same time or stage of industrial, economic or infrastructural development in every place, but it has not been established whether there are any key developments which are necessary or sufficient for such transformations to occur. Attempts have been made to link declines in mortality to the introduction of sanitation and water supply, but with mixed success. The roles of housing, street paving, air pollution, and animal keeping in fostering a hostile disease environment have been addressed less often. Municipal governance and institutions have been linked variously to poorer and to better health. How migration contributes to observed mortality rates is also poorly understood: migrants seeking work or a better life are often selected for better health, but may lack immunity to specific urban diseases. Chronic conditions such as tuberculosis may be linked to return or health-seeking migration, and such factors make it hard to disentangle the ways that migration, as other possible influences, might be linked to health outcomes.

We invite any paper which investigates the transformation of urban health or demographic regimes and we hope to gather a program which will allow comparisons of a range of places which experienced urban growth of different speeds and characters, or with different disease environments. We welcome papers addressing a wide spectrum of historical eras from the earliest cities up to the present day, and from all continents. We invite contributions from a variety of aspects including: the demographic risks of mortality and ill-health for individuals, groups and places, and the development of institutions and infrastructure and the health environment. Studies focusing on particular components of mortality (e.g. by age or cause) are encouraged as well as those which investigate less easily measured aspects of health. We welcome those who can examine the spatial details of urban health using GIS, and those who aim to shed light on the role of migration.

The IUSSP Panel on Historical Demography invites researchers to submit online a short 200-word abstract AND an extended abstract (2 to 4 pages, including tables) or a full unpublished paper for consideration. Details on submission are available at the link below.

In addition to dissemination through posting on the member-restricted portion of the IUSSP website, seminar organizers will explore possibilities for publishing the papers as an edited volume or a special issue of a journal. Papers submitted should be unpublished and, as for a journal or an edited book, authors, by submitting a paper, agree they will not propose it for publication to another editor until the committee makes a decision with regard to its possible publication.

This webinar will introduce “Free Mapping Online,” a new online map service distributed by the University of Michigan’s Spatial Data Center and the China Data Center as a promotion for the spatial study of the US and China. This web-based spatial system offers tens of thousands of free live maps with data from US and China, including census data, business data, land use data, and nighttime data.

This workshop will discuss the data sources, data access, and options for mapping and outputs. It will show how users can make maps online with their own data (in Excel file) by uploading the data to the server without any GIS tools and experience. It will also discuss future directions for data expansion and sharing.

This webinar is free and open to the public. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

The Fogarty International Center is dedicated to advancing the mission of the NIH by supporting and facilitating global health research conducted by U.S. and international investigators, building partnerships between health research institutions in the U.S. and abroad, and training the next generation of scientists to address global health needs.

FIC is seeking individuals to provide scientific leadership and manage extramural global health grant portfolios in the Division of International Training and Research. One position will serve as Program Director of the HIV Research Training Program and will provide leadership for the FIC HIV portfolio. Expertise in HIV/AIDS research and research training is desired. The second position involves leadership of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative portfolio (https://www.fic.nih.gov/Programs/Pages/mepi-junior-faculty.aspx;https://www.fic.nih.gov/Programs/Pages/medical-education-africa.aspx), which promotes health professional education and faculty career development in Africa. For this position, experience in health professional education (physicians, nurses, or other health professions) is preferred.

Qualified candidates are expected to be able to work across a wide spectrum of global health research areas. Besides having the flexibility and intellectual curiosity to work across discipline boundaries, qualified individuals should also have the ability to collaborate widely, both within NIH and outside the agency, and to work effectively as both a team member and team leader. Additionally, FIC is particularly interested in individuals with research or research training experience in low- or middle-income countries and with strong interests in the development of research career pathways for scientists from low-and middle-income countries.

This vacancy is for a Data Dissemination Specialist position in the Customer Liaison and Marketing Services Office (CLMSO) duty stationed in Seattle, WA.

Duties

The individual selected for this position will:

• Conduct outreach to key stakeholders and the public with emphasis on creating and delivering presentations and workshops to explain the availability and usability of Census data
• Use communication skills in using tactics and tools to educate audiences about Census Bureau and its programs
• Work with diverse audiences to meet their data needs and elicit support for surveys and other census activities
• Conduct research and analyze the demographics of the assignment area to assist with the development of communications strategies
• Advise senior management on local matters affecting the agency’s mission
• Document activity in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
• Collaborate with colleagues to accomplish communication projects with measurable results