What has been your pathway since graduation?
After graduation from the Bachelor of Public Health program in 2019, I started working at the Mississauga-Halton Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) as a Health System Analyst, working on automating the digitization of hospital funding documents, and developing machine learning models to predict revisits to the emergency room within 30 days. I was heavily inspired by my undergraduate courses in biostatistics, health informatics, computer science, and my capstone project, "Predicting influenza activity using artificial intelligence" which used deep learning to predict influenza cases in Canada. My technical skills then allowed me to transition to a Data Engineering role at Compass Digital Labs, where I mostly worked on our data warehouse, and supported our Data Science team to automate the training of our in-house machine learning models. During the pandemic, I joined Loblaw where I worked on automating large-scale machine learning systems that supported various verticals, mainly Loyalty (PC Optimum Program) and Health (PC Health) where I lead some of the design and architecture for these high impact systems. Having experience in Public Health and being able to work on some of the backend analytical components of PC Health was very rewarding!
I'm currently working as a a Lead Data Engineer, Score Media and Gaming (theScore) where I lead a team of data engineers that are building our data platform, where we deliver a multitude of high quality financial reports to over 17 regulators each day and support our data analysts, data scientists, and machine learning engineers.
How did your time in the School of Public Health Sciences (SPHS) help you get to where you are today?
My undergraduate program gave me the relevant technical skills to be able to conduct data analysis with rigour, and the courseware of the Health Informatics Specialization sparked a passion in me that led me down the path where I am today.
What do you consider the most essential skills for this career?
The most essential skill for a job in the data field would be the ability to learn since technology is ever changing, and you need to keep up with the latest methods and skills constantly.
What has been the greatest lesson learned since graduation?
The greatest lesson I've learned after graduation is that technical skills are transferable regardless of which industry you work in. Analyzing data is relevant in both health care as well as other industries. Don't be afraid to apply to non-health industries even though your program may be a "Public Health", or "Kinesiology", or Health Science degree.
Learn more about me!
Connect with Bradley on LinkedIn!
Check out his github