What makes a great publishable paper? How to use big data in your Public Health research? What funding opportunities are available to Early Career Researchers in Public Health? And how to do your first peer or grant review? This year’s UK Public Health Science event for Early Career Researchers in Public Health will provide you with an answer to all these questions!
Due to the current pandemic, the UK Public Health Science conference has been postponed to 26 November 2021 in Glasgow (please put this date in your diaries).
The conference has always been a great place for Public Health researchers and others to network and share ideas. To keep some of that momentum going during these time, the UK Public Health Science Conference Organising Committee are hosting a free, online Early Career Researcher Event this year.
Date and time: Friday 27 November 2020 from 13:00 to 16:00.
Venue: online, virtual event
Registration: If you weren’t able to register for the event you will now be able to view it via live-stream here.
Programme
13:00
Welcome and introduction
Prof Rob Aldridge, University College London
13.05
Opening Remarks
Prof Dame Anne Johnson, University College London
13:15
Providing critical feedback: peer reviewing as an ECR
Dr Amy Nimegeer, University of Glasgow
Receiving your first request to peer review an academic article or grant proposal can be intimidating. In this session, Dr Amy Nimegeer from the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow will cover the basics of how to approach the task with confidence, exploring the process and key principles of peer review for both academic journals and funding bodies.
13:45
How to publish in The Lancet journals
Dr Rupa Sarkar, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet Digital Health
14:15
Comfort break
14:30
Healthy Cities: Tracking Population Health from Grocery Bags and Smart Watches
Prof Daniele Quercia, Department Head of Social Dynamics at Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge (UK) and Professor of Urban Informatics at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at King’s College London.
In this session, we will see how to aggregate both readings from consumer wearable devices and records of food purchases to track people’s well-being at scale. From 11,600 Nokia Health wearables, we collected readings of steps, sleep, and heart rate in the entire cities of London and San Francisco over the course of 1 year. Christmas and New Year’s eve were associated only with short-lived and minor disruptions, while both Brexit and Trump’s election greatly impacted people’s sleep and even heart rates. Then, for another entire year in London, we studied the association between food purchases in grocery stores, as measured by the digital traces of customer loyalty cards, and consumption of medicines. Our results show that analytics of digital records of grocery purchases can be used as a cheap and scalable tool for health surveillance: the distribution of the food nutrients is far more predictive of food-related illnesses (e.g., diabetes) than socio-economic conditions.
15:00
Medical Research Council support for research careers and funding opportunities
Dr Samantha Moore, Programme Manager, Training and Careers, Medical Research Council.
This session will provide an overview of how MRC funds research, supports research careers and the funding opportunities available for early career researchers.
15:30
Peer discussion and closing remarks