Thursday, August 3, 2023

Office of Research hosts inclusive research tools webinar to break down barriers

A message from the Office of Research.

A question that often comes to the Inclusive Research team from researchers is “what are the top three things I can do to embed EDI in my work?” In response, a virtual webinar on “Inclusive Research Tools: Identifying and Addressing Barriers” has been rescheduled for August 14, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. to 12 noon. This session will help researchers identify ways to understand potential barriers that may exist in their research program, project and/or teams and will provide ideas for concrete actions to meaningfully address them.

Please register here to receive the Zoom link to participate. A recording of the same session that took place in July can be found in the Inclusive Research Resource Hub, a curated hub of training materials, guidelines and resources related to equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigenous research excellence available to everyone with a WATIAM password.

The University of Waterloo is committed to supporting faculty members to build their competencies related to embedding equity, diversity, and inclusive practices in their teams and research. The Inclusive Research team is located in the Office of the Vice-President, Research and International and works to provide ongoing development and capacity building for researchers, as outlined in the Inclusive Research Implementation Strategy.

School of Architecture director sheds 'interim' title

This article was originally published on the Faculty of Engineering website.

Dr. Maya Przybylski is dropping the ‘interim’ from her title as she begins a new appointment as the O’Donovan Director of Waterloo’s School of Architecture in September.

Przybylski has served as Waterloo Architecture’s director in an interim capacity since July 2022 after previous director Dr. Anne Bordeleau’s departure. A professor at the school since 2011, she held the associate director of undergraduate studies role before her elevation to interim director and is a past recipient of the Faculty of Engineering’s Teaching Excellence Award.

Dr. Maya Przybylski will begin serving as the School of Architecture's permanent director on Sept. 1, 2023.

Through her teaching, research and design work, Przybylski explores the complex intersection of architectural design, data and computation through her teaching, research and design work. She is a Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design graduate at the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute Medal for her thesis work. 

The appointment was announced by Dean Mary Wells, who expressed her excitement for Maya to continue bringing her unique “energy, commitment, authenticity and compassion” to her leadership role at the School of Architecture.

Workshop dives deep into health data science

By Melodie Roschman. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

The second-ever CANSSI-NISS Health Data Science Workshop will be held on the University of Waterloo campus this week, from August 3 to 4.

The workshop is sponsored by the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI) and the United States’s National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).

“Trying to answer important health questions often requires the collection and ultimately the analysis of human health data,” says Joel Dubin, an associate professor of statistics and actuarial science who is cross appointed in the School of Public Health Sciences. “A group of statisticians from the U.S. and Canada realized the need for a more computationally-focused meeting that concentrated on health data,” he explains, and the CANSSI-NISS Health Data Science Workshop was the result.

Statisticians and health data scientists from across the U.S. and Canada will hear keynotes from Charmaine Dean (vice-president, research and international and professor of statistics and actuarial science at the University of Waterloo) and Eric J. Tchetgen (professor of biostatistics and Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania).

“Addressing complicated problems requires collaboration between researchers across different fields and institutions,” says Dean. “As a leader in health and medical research, and the home of the only dedicated Faculty of Mathematics in North America, Waterloo is proud to help facilitate interdisciplinary partnerships and innovation in the field of Health Data Science.”

Attendees will also have opportunities to network with potential collaborators, share research posters and learn from three invited sessions on “Statistical Methods for Precision Health,” “Causal Inference for Big Health Data” and “AI and Health Data Science.”

Yeying Zhu, an associate professor of statistics and actuarial science at Waterloo, is on the organizing committee alongside Dubin. She explains that the organizers hope to provide “a forum to bring biostatisticians and health researchers from the U.S. and Canada together to generate more research collaborations.”

Richard Cook, professor of statistics at the University of Waterloo, is chairing the session on Casual Inference for Big Health Data. “Many scientific questions in health research are at least implicitly about causal effects,” he says. “There is much excitement about the massive volumes of administrative health data now available for research. This workshop will bring together leading experts in causal analysis to discuss the most modern statistical approaches for meaningful analyses based on administrative data.”

While other conferences in both statistics and health may feature individual sessions or panels on this topic, the organizers hope that this meeting will provide researchers we an opportunity for more in-depth and specific inquiry and discussion.

You can learn more about the CANSSI-NISS Health Data Science Workshop on its event page.