2024: A bigger, bolder Bennett
- Posted:
2024 was another extraordinary year for the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science. There’s so much to celebrate as we head into 2025, which promises to be more extraordinary still.
- We saw 26 papers published from the OpenSAFELY platform (including 8 papers led by members of the Bennett team).
- Highlights of published work include studies on how people’s health was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and on how data gets recorded in primary care.
- We grew the team to 59 people, welcoming new researchers, developers, data scientists, programme and product managers, a research software advocate, a PPIE lead, some organisers and administrators, and more!
- We conducted a small internal re-organisation project, to better manage the rapidly growing team
- We came together in Birmingham for a 2-day team retreat
Indulging in some traditional pointing during the team retreat
- We won an MRC award for open science
- We started work on several newly awarded grants, including ECHO, a project looking at COVID-19 vaccines using OpenSAFELY and another one to add the Maternity Services Dataset to OpenSAFELY
- We launched the OpenPrescribing Improvement Radar tool
- We started work on OpenPrescribing Hospitals
- We welcomed celebrated epidemiologist friend George Davey Smith on a 2-day visit to Oxford, where he gave 2 public lectures and spent time mentoring our researchers
George Davey Smith giving his public lecture on Mendelian randomisation
- We mused on the possibilities for using the ideas and technologies behind OpenSAFELY for purposes outside the realm of electronic health records - perhaps in schools; perhaps in the commercial sector - more on this next year
- We rolled out our new OpenSAFELY logo
- We welcomed 200 guests to our OpenSAFELY Community Symposium in London, published the whole event as a video playlist on YouTube
Peter Bennett, our benefactor, and Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief of The BMJ, chatting on day 1 of our OpenSAFELY symposium
Workshop participants on day 2 of our OpenSAFELY symposium
- We published this small book: The past, present and future of OpenSAFELY
Our booklet on the past, present and future of OpenSAFELY
- And lastly, we humbly and gratefully accepted generous new funding from Wellcome - we’ll have more to say about that in the new year
We’re looking forward to ever more productive work next year, and we’re keen as ever to have new folk to join our huge collaborator network: if you’re keen, get in touch!