BRC Fellow wins prestigious funding to bolster data science research

One of the NIHR Newcastle BRC’s Fellows has won coveted scholarship funding to undertake a master’s degree in health data science – and gain valuable skills to support the BRC’s innovative research projects looking at age-related conditions.

Dr Mo Osman, NIHR Newcastle BRC’s Informatics Fellow has secured a place on the new Master’s degree in Health Data Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) after winning prestigious scholarship funding from Health Data Research UK (HDRUK).

Dr Osman is a junior doctor who is part of the AGE research group. He is working on developing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm, which he hopes will identify patients with sarcopenia and physical frailty from electronic healthcare records. If successful, this would function as a useful screening tool to identify patients with these conditions.

And he believes that the skills he will gain from his Master’s degree will be invaluable to this project.

He said:

“I wanted to further develop my skills and get some formal training in health data and join the dots with what I’ve learned so far. This study will help with the research I’m doing to develop an algorithm that identifies patients with sarcopenia. This will help with that research and help towards achieving my goal of creating that screening safety net.”

Professor Miles Witham, joint Theme Lead for Ageing, Sarcopenia and Multimorbidity in the NIHR Newcastle BRC, added: “It has been a pleasure supervising Mo as a BRC Informatics Fellow over the last year. His studies on finding better ways to diagnose sarcopenia using big clinical data are a great example of the innovative work on sarcopenia and ageing conditions that we are undertaking in the BRC. We are really pleased that he has been accepted onto this Masters course, which is a great step for Mo’s career, and so important for developing much-needed skills and capacity in data science for ageing research”

Dr Osman joined the NIHR Newcastle BRC earlier this year in a brand-new role as Informatics Fellow, which reflects the rapidly growing trend in healthcare to understand more about electronic patient records and the wealth of information that data can bring.