Welcome

Nicky Wakim

Nicky Wakim (she/her)

• Call me “Nicky,” “Dr. W,” “Professor Wakim,” or any combo!

• Assistant Professor of Biostatistics

   

• Grew up in DC area (Virginia side!)

• Moved here from Michigan around 3 years ago

• Two sweet kitties (and a third smush face from my roommate)

• Volleyball, pickleball, ceramics, strolling around my neighborhood

• But also sleeping, TV, and reading

• Proud plant mamma (recently turned outdoor plant mamma)

• A few other things about myself that I will share non-publicly

Our course description

Directly from the website:

Welcome to PUBH 523/623! This course provides an introduction to programming in R in public health, medicine, and related fields. Students will gain basic proficiency with the R environment and toolkit, focusing on reproducible workflows, data manipulation, visualization, and reporting. Topics include basic R programming, working in project-based folders, data transformations and summaries, data visualizations and plots, generating dynamic reports, and constructing summary tables. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable initiating data exploration projects in R and will be prepared to apply these skills in further analysis courses. No prior statistical or coding experience is expected or required.

Course Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, students should be able to…

 

1. Set up and manage project-based folders to build reproducible workflows.

 

2. Clean, filter, restructure, and summarize datasets using standard R toolkits.

 

3. Create clear, publication-quality data visualizations and figures to represent trends and summaries.

 

4. Launch a data exploration project on a new dataset, preparing it for advanced statistical analysis.

Our course in the context of the data life cycle

In this class, we will cover the following topics:

• Importing data
• Tidying data
• Transforming data
• Visualizing data
• Summarizing data

Figure from R for Data Science TB

Main themes in this course