This week, Brown held its fifth-ever Love Data Week, featuring presentations on research data management and data services delivered by researchers, professors and industry professionals, according to the event’s website.
This year’s theme — “My Kind of Data” — emphasizes the personal nature of data and its potential to create a more inclusive world. According to Andrew Creamer, the University’s science data specialist and this year’s conference organizer, the theme led to a focus on precision medicine and biomedicine.
“When (we were) thinking about how to reflect the theme and incorporate diversity and inclusion … we thought of precision medicine,” Creamer said.
Several speakers presented on the All of Us research database, which aims to “recruit more representative sample health information gathered from the population,” Creamer explained.
The kickoff event for the week-long series — “All of Us Researcher Workbench Lunch & Learn” — was offered in a hybrid format on Monday. Ethan Drake ’24, an environmental studies concentrator who attended the presentation, said that the event expanded his knowledge of the database.
Also on Monday, University Head of Geographic Information Systems and Data Services Frank Donnelly gave a presentation on The Ocean State Spatial Database and demonstrated its functionality.
A Thursday presentation led by Health Applications Analyst Jonah Bradenday and Manager of Health Data Science Karen Crowley for the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics featured an introduction to useful health terminologies when analyzing health databases.
The presentation covered Healthcare Common Data Models, which organize “data into a standard structure to facilitate data sharing and research,” according to their presentation. Bradenday and Crowley used various examples of CDMs — such as PhecodeX — to show attendees how to utilize these sources.
Kaden Bunch MD’27 attended the presentation to “learn how to create requests in retrieving data from hospital networks.”
“One of the largest resources hospitals have in this day and age is their medical information,” Bunch wrote in an email to The Herald. “Learning how to obtain it and navigate it will allow for extremely comprehensive research and determining (of) relationships between different diseases and/or medications.”
Upcoming events will continue to address the theme of personal data. Dan Turner, assistant director of the Community-Engaged Data and Evaluation Collaborative, will lead a panel on Friday on “data, evaluation and research priorities identified and valued by nonprofit and public agencies in Rhode Island,” according to the event description.
Turner’s work also seeks “to strengthen the existing infrastructure in Rhode Island around data,” he wrote in an email to The Herald. “For our Love Data Week panel, we’ve invited a few community partners who work with data …to address Rhode Island’s data priorities, from climate resilience to housing access and digital connectivity.”
According to Turner, the panel will discuss how “community priorities around data are defined” and how “data-centric collaborations across groups and institutions” can help strengthen community assets.
Creamer emphasized that despite the week’s focus on biomedicine, individuals from “any discipline” can benefit from the events.
“In professional and personal ways, our lives are increasingly influenced by data collection and data-driven decision-making,” Turner wrote. “Taking this time to reflect on our methods and collaborations with data can support building meaningful, lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships across and beyond campus.”
The full schedule of events can be found on Love Data Week’s website.
Claire Song is a Senior Staff Writer covering science & research. She is a freshman from California studying Applied Math-Biology. She likes to drink boba in her free time.
