Participant Applications Now Open: Health Disparities Codeathon

Health Disparities Codeathon

The National Institutes of Health Office of Data Science Strategy, in partnership with the Howard University Research Centers for Minority Institutions Program, is pleased to announce a virtual codeathon focused on health disparities on June 21-24.  Participant applications are due June 7.

This event is free and open to all researchers, medical professionals, data scientists and coders. Codeathon participants will increase their capacity building, hone their data science skills, learn more about health disparities, and build new relationships during this four-day event.

Participants will be selected based on experience and motivation to attend. Applicants confirming their participation are expected to participate in the full event.

Scientists at any stage of their data science journey are encouraged to apply. Codeathon teams will benefit from team members with any of the following skills:

• Working knowledge health disparities
• Working knowledge of scripting
• Familiarity with methods for manipulating and/or analyzing large datasets
• Data visualization
• Analyzing sequencing data types
• Machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques
• Cloud computing

Interested participants should apply by June 7. Questions about this event may be sent to ds-outreach@nih.gov.

Projects

• Mediation analysis for disparity research
• Cancer health disparities through genomic epidemiology lens
• A culturally humble and affordable digital platform to empower at-risk families, particularly ethnic minority and low-income families, to improve nutrition.
• Racial and socioeconomic disparities in adolescent and young adult cancers
• SEER OUT - Exploring disparities in cancer screening, surveillance and interventions
• Examination of COVID-19's impact on maternal health disparities.
• Supporting Pandemic Recovery: Building insights on vaccine hesitancy in the communities hardest hit by COVID-19
• Exploring the equity of vaccine allocation across the United States by county.
• Harmonizing data for social determinants of health
• Mapping clinical SDOH screening tools to ICD-10 SDOH Z Codes to create EHR workflows for data capture and referral
• A Way Out: Pandemic preparedness in context of health disparities to limit disproportionate morbidity and mortality

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to assemble a team?

No. We will create working groups of 5-6 individuals who have various backgrounds and relevant expertise to work on each project. Each team will also have mentors with technical expertise and working knowledge of historically underserved and disadvantaged communities.

What will we build?

We will make all pipelines, other scripts, software, and programs generated in this codeathon available on a dedicated public GitHub repository.  You can check out previous projects here.

Teams may submit manuscripts describing the design and use of the software tools they created to an appropriate journal.

Legal Information

Participants retain ownership of all intellectual property rights (including moral rights) to the code submitted to as well as developed in the codeathon. Employees of the U.S. Government attending as part of their official duties retain no copyright to their work and their work is in the public domain in the U.S. The Government disclaims any rights to the code submitted or developed in the codeathon. Participants agree to publish the code and any related data on GitHub.

Please contact us if you have questions or need more information.