Compiled by Rachel Plachcinski, Megha Singh and Ing Lee
Happy new year!
The MuM-PreDiCT team is starting 2023 on a real high as in December we found out that we were Health Data Research UK’s Team of the Year!
HDR UK awards prizes for excellence in health data research and we were commended for our innovative patient and public involvement activities, inclusive leadership and involvement of early career researchers.
We were also shortlisted for the Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement award for “purposeful involvement and deliberately broad PPIE group, including people with HIV and from the LGBTQ+ community. Of note is the team’s novel approach of ‘deep dives’ with underserved communities to provide a convenient and comfortable space for participation.” MuM-PreDiCT PPI lead Rachel Plachcinski added: “It’s great to be nominated for this award, and to be shortlisted alongside such amazing projects as Gut Reaction (who won).”
HDR UK also highlighted the hidden roles in research, with awards to practices and people who have had an impact on research delivery. Congratulations on this go to Rachel, Ngawai and Megha, plus Yuangen Li, our fabulous finance lead, and Krishna Gokhale, Aditya Acharya and Alecsandrou Vitoc, our computer scientists behind the scenes.
Other achievements
Our first full year of work has seen lots of great work by team members. Early career researcher Stephanie Hanley got things off to a great start by winning funding to set up a Community of Practice for patient and public involvement in multimorbidity research. This was launched at a face to face meeting in Birmingham in November which was attended by researchers, PPI leads and patient and public representatives.
We’ve published three papers, with more in the pipeline:
mmVAE: multimorbidity clustering using Relaxed Bernoulli β-Variational Autoencoders
Members of our team have given presentations at international conferences, including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) World Congress, British Maternal and Fetal Medicine Society (BMFMS), MacDonald Obstetric Medicine Society (MOMS), European Conference on Preconception Health and Care, the Inaugural Collaborative Research and Innovation Symposium, the MRC Midlands Early Career Researcher Meeting and the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN).
Prizes were awarded to Amaya Azcoaga-Lorenzo for the best poster at the Inaugural Collaborative Research and Innovation Symposium NHS Fife and University of St Andrews, and to Anuradha Subramanian for the best oral presentation in the high risk pregnancy category at the RCOG World Congress.
And finally, here’s a collection of our MuM-PreDiCT conference posters:
RCOG World Congress 2022
University of St Andrews & NHS Fife Inaugural Collaborative Research and Innovation Symposium
British Maternal & Fetal Medicine & MacDonald Obstetric Medicine Society Joint Conference 2022
We’re looking forward to an exciting and productive 2023!