aug 19, 2024: a week in the life

this week

Just on time … I submitted my poster for my Glasgow conference on Monday with a few hours to spare! I resisted the urge to place a tiny illustration of me with my polar bear near my contact details, but we’ll see whether that’ll make it onto the printed version … For the rest of the week, I planned my approach to several primary analyses using our blood donor studies, interrogated my first-year report some more, and made minor revisions to my review manuscript! My working days were a little shorter than they usually are this week as I recovered from a jarring weekend, but I’m okay with my progress.

next week

I’ve decided to get a head start on my thesis! I plan to finish up a general introduction by the end of the week (albeit a terrible one). I figured that that section shouldn’t change much throughout the rest of my research journey. I also plan to print out my first-year report, which should help me identify even more potential questions from assessors. Finally, I plan to have a fun play with causal inference methods I learned during my undergraduate degree and think about how I can apply them to my current topic.

outside the lab

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT TIME! I took a half day off on Wednesday to join colleagues who work with genetic data to talk about DNA with children and families in northern Cambridge. As a research unit, this is an early step in our mission to reach relatively underserved populations in our public engagement, and the event was the highlight of my week.

on the reading list

Sanderson E, Macdonald-Wallis C, Davey Smith G. Negative control exposure studies in the presence of measurement error: implications for attempted effect estimate calibration. Int J Epidemiol. 2018 Apr 1;47(2):587-596. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyx213.

weekly photo

Saturday motivation from our public engagement event.

about me

I’m Yaning (she/her), a PhD candidate in Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. I am working with colleagues in the Blood and Transplant Research Unit, the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, and NHS Blood and Transplant (England’s national blood service) to improve the safety and efficiency of voluntary whole blood donation. I’m supervised by the amazing Dr Lois Kim and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. This is my blog about my journey through this candidature, starting from nine months before my transfer of status. Please feel free to reach out at yw645 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk!