How I learned to code
And the impact I've had in academia as a result.
This is the second in a series of posts, where I talk about my career, how I got to where I am now, and where I want to go in the future.
After I finished my PhD I started working as a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, where I manage and lead the research program for the Burns Registry of Australia and New Zealand (or BRANZ).
The BRANZ is a big database that collects information about patients that present to specialist burn services across the two countries. We use this data for research, but also to inform prevention and educational activities in order to reduce the number of people who get burned, but also to help provide consistent, high quality care for people who are admitted to hospital with a burn. We have data on over 40,000 patients who have been admitted to hospital over a 15 year period, so there are plenty of numbers to crunch.
Coming into the role I knew nothing about burns, and even less about how to code. And when I say code, I mean writing commands in programs like R, Stata, or Python to work with data - filtering, grouping, mutating, and the like.