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Communicating Your Findings Visually: Lessons from the Global Burden of Disease Study

Communicating Your Findings Visually: Lessons from the Global Burden of Disease Study

When:
October 27, 2016 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm America/Los Angeles Timezone
2016-10-27T13:00:00-07:00
2016-10-27T14:30:00-07:00
Where:
UW Medicine South Lake Union, Orin Smith Auditorium
850 Republican St
Seattle, WA 98109
USA
Cost:
Free
Contact:
ITHS Education

Data visualization is one of the most important components of communicating and presenting your research findings.

In our next Career Development Series event, we are excited to be joined by Dr. Abraham Flaxman, Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

Dr. Flaxman will discuss how researchers used data visualization to display findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD), the largest and most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. Funded by the Gates Foundation, a team of hundreds of researchers has invested thousands of person-years to produce comparable estimates of disease burden.

“I believe that it is not the estimates themselves, but the interactive display of the study’s findings that has made it so successful,” Dr. Flaxman said.  “In this talk, I will explain why, and teach how you can successfully communicate your results visually, too.”

Remember to bring pencils and paper. You’ll have the chance to sketch your own charts and practice offering and receiving constructive criticism with your colleagues. Because learning data visualization is a never-ending journey, Dr. Flaxman will also share resources from across the University of Washington that can help you further your skills.

Join on us October 27 to:

  • Sketch your own common and novel displays of quantitative information
  • Practice offering and receiving constructive criticism on the charts of your colleagues
  • Make a principled choice between alternative forms of visual display
  • Continue to develop your experience and ability with data visualization
About Dr. Abraham Flaxman

Abraham Flaxman, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is currently leading the development of new methods for measuring cost effectiveness of health interventions and for making detailed maps of disease using all available data. He is engaged in methodological and operational research on verbal autopsy.

Dr. Flaxman has previously developed software tools such as DisMod-MR, used by IHME to estimate the Global Burden of Disease, and the Bednet Stock-and-Flow Model, which has produced estimates of insecticide treated net coverage in sub-Saharan Africa for several editions of the World Malaria Report. This work uses Integrative Systems Modeling to combine a system dynamics model of process with a statistical model of data, to bring together all available sources of information. Dr. Flaxman earned his BS in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.