Online Program

Thursday, February 21
PS1 Poster Session 1 & Opening Mixer Thu, Feb 21, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom

Leveraging Capacity Building at a Research Institute to Further Develop a Biostatistics Course at a Local University (302558)

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*Greg Fegan, KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme & University of Oxford 

Keywords: Kenya, health, biological sciences, research, training,University, biostatistics, Stata, R

As in many parts of the world the demand for statistically aware graduates is outstripped by the limited supply. As part of a measure to build more capacity within a world renowned tropical health research institute we have partnered with a local, new and rapidly evolving University to deliver biostatistical training at both institutions. This started in the first instance by inviting university staff to assist the research institute staff with delivering its biennial introductory statistics class in a kind of informal training of trainers manner. We will then reverse the roles and deliver the same course to students at the university by their staff with assistance from staff from the research institute. To facilitate this we have deployed the freely available Rstudio Server platform and translated the Stata code that the original course was built around into R code. We are intending to use this collaboration as the foundation of a biostatistical module within a forthcoming program in Statistics that the University wishes to develop in 2013. We believe that by use of existing material, re-purposed and re-tooled for use with free, open source software makes the prospects for doing this more likely to succeed. In our presentation we outline the history of the institutes involved, the work done, lessons learned and future directions.