The Health Equity Data Science Challenge

Hosted by the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society and the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, the Health Equity Data Challenge is an opportunity for student teams to tackle an interesting, data-driven question related to health equity.

Over the course of a month, participants will design a project that utilizes one or two of several provided datasets, with guidance and feedback from a panel of graduate students and faculty. The challenge culminates in project presentations to peers, faculty, and industry leaders.

Register for the info session (Sep 20 at 1 pm on Zoom)


Benefits:

  • Societal Impact: Explore open questions in health equity with real-world datasets.
  • Networking: Present your findings to academic and industry leaders.
  • Resume Building: Option to create a data story or dashboard that you can publish on the dataMichiana website.
  • Cash Prizes: The winning team will receive $2500 and two runner-up teams will each receive $1000.

Important Dates:

DateDetails
Sep 20Info Session at 1 pm on Zoom; register here
Oct 4Deadline to sign-up
Oct 7Challenge kick-off meeting at 5 PM; datasets and detailed instructions will be released
Oct 8-31Intermediate meeting with graduate student mentor
Nov 1Intermediate Pitch: Propose your project (including datasets to be used and the main question), provide preliminary results to a panel of graduate students/faculty, and receive feedback.
Nov 4-14Practice presentation with graduate mentor
Nov 15Final presentations to graduate student/faculty panel and industry leaders

Eligibility:

All participants must be currently enrolled Notre Dame or Saint Mary’s undergraduate students.

All teams must have at least 2 representatives present at the Final Presentations, which will take place on Friday, November 15 from 1-4 PM.

Teams:

  • Create a team of 2-4 students to work with
  • Sign up via linkonly one submission per team is necessary. Please make sure that your teammates have agreed before you list their names.
  • If you don’t have a team, please indicate this on the sign-up form. We will try to match you with 1-3 other students who have also signed up as individuals.

Final Project Information:

Presentation:

  • 10-minute slide presentation with dataset, question, methods, results/discussion, and conclusion. The best presentations will be data-driven narratives, so tell a story with the data!
  • The format is flexible, including slides, data dashboard presentation, html/markdown, etc. Should include figures, maps, other visualizations, etc.

Data/Code:

  • Code used should be well annotated/commented, and publicly available (e.g. on github). A link to access code should be provided in the presentation.
  • Any language or data analysis techniques can be used, although R and python are encouraged.

Scoring Rubric:

Projects will be judged by a panel of graduate students and faculty who will independently score projects before an aggregation of the scores will be used to calculate winners. The scoring rubric is available here.