Vania Academica

  1. Vania, a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, studies respiratory viruses and outbreak infections. She is also responsible for teaching a short course on applied statistic and mathematics for infectious disease modeling to fifty second-year Master and PhD students every year. (Students complain that the department’s course do not provide the programming skills they need for current research in the field.)

  2. Vania runs several studies on different countries each year. She used to analyze the results with Stata and MATLAB, but is switching to R (which she taught herself during a sabbatical). She has never taken a programming course, and suffers from impostor syndrome in discussions about things like GitHub and R Markdown.

  3. Vania would like to learn more about time series analysis to support her research, and about tools like Git and R Markdown. She also wants guidance using R to teach her short course on infectious disease modeling, which currently uses a mixture of Excel, Stata, and Berkeley Madonna.

  4. Vania is juggling half a dozen responsibilities at work, and doesn’t want to look uninformed in front of her colleagues and students.

Needs

  • Vania needs workshops (so that she can allocate focused time) and case studies (for her research).

  • She would like ready-to-use tutorials she could reuse or remix for her students and some orientation material to demystify jargon (what the hell is a “pull request”?).

  • Finally, it’s important that she be able to use the same tools in her research as in her teaching in order to amortize learning costs and stay in practice.