#MentorMonday: Dana Plude, Jon King, and Partha Bhattacharyya

Dr. Dana Plude, Deputy Director   

Dr. Jon King, Senior Scientific Advisor   

Dr. Partha Bhattacharyya, Director, Office of Research Resources

National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Division of Behavioral & Social Research

Working on two sides of the challenge.

Our division supports large-scale longitudinal research studies and there is an increasing need for facilitating access by scientists (and others) to the datasets generated by these studies. Our fellows are working on two sides of that challenge:

1. Providing information to potential users of those datasets about the most efficient and effective means of merging datasets (via hash algorithms) to yield successful cross-dataset matches, and

2. Organizing access to the datasets in a way that is efficient, appealing and effective (via appropriate data-access products).

We count on the fellows to bring not only focal expertise relevant to their projects, but also fresh ideas from an ‘outside’ perspective and one that is informed by their prior work in data science.

Vishal Dubey is working with data from NIA-funded longitudinal studies and private data vendors to conduct performance evaluations of hash algorithms, prepare a presentation/recommendations for senior leadership, and, if feasible, publish a paper with guidelines for using hash algorithms in research environments.

Tim Nguyen is creating a product line/road map and recommend a cloud environment where data can be shared broadly from multiple data sources and in a most cost efficient manner using the NIH STRIDES program or other cloud providers as such as Desktop as a Service (DaaS).