Here, the Head of Programme Delivery for Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) Data Portal and SeRP, Emma Squires, talks about her team’s experience of hosting their interns. This summer Emma and the DPUK team are hosting interns Neel Basak and Joseph Mclaughlin.
Neel, a recent graduate in Human Genetics and Computational Biology at University College London, is working on a DPUK project that uses machine learning techniques to identify and validate biomarkers for major depressive disorder and anxiety. Joseph is a third-year student of Medicine at Swansea University and is studying the effect of neuroimaging processing pipelines on the quality and prediction accuracy of machine learning analysis.
“Our team have seen how successful the previous rounds of the Population Data Science Summer Internship have been and the great candidates that have found positions across Population Data Science. This year we had the opportunity to recruit two interns to work on projects in our team. We considered them to be perfect projects for interns to be able to really develop, bring their expertise and have something tangible to show for their time with us.
The projects that developed, and the nature of DPUK itself, are quite bespoke and really needed someone passionate in those areas to move them forward and we’ve been very lucky to find two great interns who are doing just that.
DPUK is a very innovative Trusted Research Environment (TRE), working heavily in complex areas such as neuroimaging. The supportive environment of DPUK and the cutting-edge nature of the projects mean the interns have had the chance to develop skills in these niche areas. The interns also get to experience what it is like to work within data science and be embedded into an operations and research team.
As a team we’ve benefitted from having Neel and Joseph working with us. Their time with us has meant that we have been able to move forward with these smaller, but beneficial projects that ordinarily we wouldn’t have been able to resource. The insight gained from these projects, and the work carried out by Neel and Joseph will certainly benefit DPUK.
Supporting interns is important for developing the skills and experience needed by TREs to meet the demands of newer, large-scale analysis methods.
We are still quite early into the programme, but our interns are making exceptional progress, and we can already see that the work they are doing will be beneficial to DPUK longer term.”
For further information on the Population Data Science Summer Internship Programme, click here.