Published 26 July 2019
Dr. Saumyadipta Pyne, the Scientific Director of PHDL, will be teaching a new Biostatistics course in Fall 2019, BIOSTAT 2036: Introduction to Health Data Science. This course will teach students methods and concepts in data science that are motivated by real life problems in public health. Students will become familiar with data science terms and will learn the concepts of exploratory data analysis, data cleaning, data wrangling, and visualization. Students will learn the necessary skills to tidy, manage, and visualize data and communicate results. This course will mainly use the R programming language but will also teach certain concepts in SQL and Python. The course lectures will cover the following general themes: data structures and representation, data wrangling and processing, computational tools and techniques, and case studies illustrating steps of analysis of real data, including examples from public health.
BIOSTAT 2036 is a newly designed introduction to data science that will be one of the required courses in the soon to be formalized data science concentration of the MS degree in Biostatistics at Pitt Public Health though it will be open to any student. The prerequisite (co-requisite) is BIOST 2039 or permission of instructor. It will be offered in Fall 2019 on Tuesdays, 2:30-4:20 pm in Room A425 Public Health.