Bayes4Health held a postdoc away day on September 14, 2021 in the Pitt building, Cambridge. The event’s main objective was to promote collaborations between postdocs from the Bayes4health grant and postdocs from the Biostatistics unit (BSU) in Cambridge. Serendipitously, many postdocs from B4h’s sister grant CoSInES were able to join and participate in the discussion.

The event consisted of six talks given by BSU postdocs about their research, with particular emphasis on the recent research and open challenges. The speakers were Sanmitra Ghosh, Pantelis Samartsidis, Bemsibom Toh, Solon Karapanagiotis, Angelos Alexopoulos, Johan van der Molen.

The aim of the event was for postdocs to have a safe space to discuss the problems they are currently stuck on, brainstorm ideas, and tap into the collective expertise of the room to find new solutions and perspectives. After each talk there was some discussion, and a general discussion took place in the afternoon, where the attendees broke off in separate groups, discussing with the speakers and amongst themselves about potential new approaches to the problems discussed. The discussion touched various themes including Markov chain Monte Carlo, Nonparametric statistics, Neural Networks, Variational Bayes and approximate Bayesian inference, with particular attention to the application of these methods to clinical, epidemiological, and omics data. Most attendees actively participated to the discussion, and some Bayes4Health and CoSInES postdocs are currently being involved in BSU events.

A total of 17 people attended the event, which for most attendees was the first live event since the start of the pandemic. The event was organised by Simone Gristwood, Alison Quenault, and Filippo Pagani. The venue was particularly appropriate for the event, with the Pitt building having experience in running covid-secure events, and the catering was carefully organised in terms of covid safety measures.