Student-Led Biostatistics Seminars

Scholarship Information Session, August 6, 2020.


BUGS hosted an informal information session on scholarships and funding opportunities for biostatistics students within the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Primarily, we provide information on the main federal and provincial scholarships: NSERC, CIHR and OGS/QEII. This session is relevant for both domestic and international students.

Unlike more general workshops offered by the university that focus on proposal writing, we want to provide you this information through a biostatistics student’s perspective. Our goal is to equip you with all the sufficient information in time for the scholarship deadlines in September/October and encourage you all (if not, then most) to apply for these awards.

Date: Thursday, August 6, 2020
Time: 12pm – 1pm (Eastern Time)
Location: Zoom

In the 1-hour information session, we’ll be going through general information in the first 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of informal Q&A. Three current biostatistics PhD students will be present to share their experiences.

Sumeet Kalia, Year 4 (NSERC)
Erik Lovblom, Year 3 (CIHR)
Thai-Son Tang, Year 3 (QEII)

3rd BUGS Computational Workshop:
Introduction to optimization and parallel processing in R

Osvaldo-Espin Garcia is a senior biostatistician within the Department of Biostatistics of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Osvaldo recently completed his PhD in Biostatistics from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto on “Advances in Incomplete Data Methods for Statistical Genetics” with research interests in methods development for statistical genetics, design and analysis of two-phase studies, as well as the analysis of microbiome data.

This workshop will cover optimization and parallel processing in R. The workshop will take place in a computer lab, therefore computers will be available for those wishing to follow along. However, you are most welcome to bring your own laptop for this event.

Event Details

Speaker: Osvaldo Espin-Garcia

Date: Friday, March 6, 2020

Time: 3pm-5pm

Location: Room 790, Health Sciences Building, 155 College Street

 

2nd BUGS Computational Workshop:
Introduction to MCMC and Bayesian modeling with WinBUGS

Omid Aghababaei Jazi is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Eleanor Pullenayegum within Child Health Evaluative Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children. Omid obtained his PhD in Statistics from McGill University in 2019 with research focuses on longitudinal data analysis, biased sampling and variable selection methods.

Event Details

  • Speaker: Omid Aghababaei Jazi
  • Date: Thursday, December 12, 2019
  • Time: 2pm-4pm
  • Location: Room 108, Health Sciences Building, 155 College Street

1st BUGS Computational Workshop:
Mixing R and C++: an introductory tutorial for (bio)statistics students

Luc Villandré is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Patrick Brown at the Centre for Global Health Research. Luc obtained his PhD in Biostatistics from McGill University in 2018 and has been using R for over 15 years, as well as Rcpp for the last 8 years. His current work focuses on scalable Bayesian methods for spatiotemporal data.

  • Speaker: Luc Villandré
  • Date: Friday, November 8, 2019
  • Time: 2pm-4pm
  • Location: Room 696, Health Sciences Building, 155 College Street

A Workshop on OpenBUGS

  • Speaker: Shahriar Shams
  • Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2019
  • Time: 2pm-3pm
  • Location: HS 574

Shahriar Shams, a fifth year PhD student, will be hosting an OpenBUGS workshop to familiarize students with Bayesian inference and running regression models via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Shahriar will also be giving examples of running MCMC in R via the “R2OpenBUGS” package and some basic visual illustrations (trace plots, posterior density plots) using the “mcmcplots” package.

CV and Cover Letter Workshop for Statisticians, Biostatisticians and Analysts

  • Speaker: Kuan Liu
  • Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2019
  • Time: 2pm-3pm
  • Location: HS 574

Kuan Liu, a fourth year PhD student, will be hosting a CV and Cover Letter workshop to assist students who are thinking of applying to jobs as statisticians, biostatisticians and analysts after finishing their studies. Kuan has previously worked for nearly 3 years at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and unlike many conventional workshops, can provide insights on the employer’s point-of-view through the lens of a statistician.

Some of our past seminars have included:

  • Introduction to SAS & SAS macros (Shariar Shams)
  • Introduction to Data Analysis with R (Michael Moon, Kaviul Khan)
  • Latex: A neat way to write reports (Osvaldo Espin)
  • Guidelines for writing scientific reports (Katherine Daignault)
  • Data cleaning and Manipulation with ”dplyr” package in R (Tim Guimond)
  • Introduction to R Markdown (Nnenna Asidianya)
  • Guidelines for preparing CV and Cover letters (Kuan Liu)
  • Poster Presentation (Katherine Daignault)