The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) R Group for BioSurveillance – which includes about 75 members in local, state, and federal health agencies and in academic research institutions – is looking for new members. The group has been meeting monthly for two years and hosts presentations geared for either beginners or advanced users. Below are more details about the group:

Mission
To Connect R Users and Advance the Practice of R in Public Health Surveillance

Objectives

• Enable new and inexperienced users to gain the skills required for the data management, analysis, and visualization tasks that they seek using the R language.
• Facilitate the sharing of approaches, programming techniques, and code among current users.
• Involvement with the growing global community of epidemiologists and developers using R to advance the science of disease surveillance.

Activities
The R Group hosts monthly webinars. These webinars typically fall into 3 categories:

• Research: A public health researcher who uses R will present their work, as well as the code used to conduct the analysis. These are often highly technical, both in coding and in the statistical analyses used. They are a great way to see what is happening in academia at the intersection of R and surveillance.
• Practice: A public health practitioner will share an application they made in R. These applications are often in RShiny or RMarkdown. They are tools that could be useful at your agency, and we encourage everyone to explore the code used to make these tools.
• Tutorials: An experienced R user will provide a tutorial on how to use a package, a set of packages, or conduct a specific type of analysis. These webinars tend to be accessible to every level of R users, including newcomers.

To join the group, create a free guest profile on the ISDS website and join the ISDS R Group for BioSurveillance. You can also email Catherine Tong ([email protected]) and ask that she add you to the R Group for BioSurveillance’s emailing list. You will then begin receiving the group’s email notices about webinars and other group activities you can sign up for.