It’s been a few years in the making. With ongoing collaborations with IHTM alumni on projects in Liberia and Seychelles and having initiated the Open and Reproducible Science in R module 4 years ago, we’ve finally been able to formalise our vision of global health partnerships and collaboration.
Introducing Oxford iHealth, an initiative within the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine to foster innovation, research, and education in the field of computational sciences for global health.
Our Approach
Rooted science
Our work is anchored on empowering, enriching, and liberating collaboration with our partners. We do not have a research agenda per se. Rather, our partners put forward their own learning needs, research priorities, and operational requirements in relation to global health challenges that they face. Together we identify existing skills and capacity, available material resources, and funds at hand upon which we jointly develop a capacity building, research implementation, and fundraising agenda that builds on existing strengths and addresses current limitations. It is, then, based on this common holistic agenda that we iterate and collaborate. This recognises what our partners often say “No science and research about us and for us without us”.
Open and reproducible
We believe that science and research is a community undertaking rather than an individual effort. Open and reproducible science and research practices are essential community building blocks. We achieve this through:
Creating technical framework for global health science and research through robust and performant R software developed by our team and our collaborators that lower the workload/threshold between data collection, processing, and data analysis towards insight and discovery.
Ensuring that relevant global health data are easily accessible, tools to work with such data are more available and usable, and guidance on best practices for using such tools are widely shared.
Building capacity of partners and collaborators in the usage of our tools and in the practice of open and reproducible science.
Action-oriented
We work together with partners and collaborators to devise strategies and solutions to global health challenges they face. We collectively engage in research to understand the identified problem and to find ways to bring about change.
Oxford iHealth is about
Modern, effective, and ethical data use driving evidence-based strategies and policies for improving global health
State-of-the-science analytic and computational workflows that are open and reproducible
Discoveries that impact on global health and measures that assess global health impact