Yaning Wu

Yaning Wu

PhD student | storyteller | 🇨🇳🇺🇸🇪🇬🇰🇪🇬🇧

november 16, 2024: a week in the life

2 minute read

Published:

this week

It’s been a week of presentations! On Wednesday, I presented findings from my first primary analyses in an intimate setting and had a great conversation with the attendees. On Thursday, I presented to a larger audience, including senior scientists within the Department of Public Health and Primary Care. I’ve also built on my manuscript draft for that primary analysis, which I hope to share with my supervisor soon. I’ve also spent several hours trying to improve on a proposal for a simulation modelling analysis according to comments from my supervisor. Finally, I’ve been working through final admin procedures for our accepted review paper!

next week

It’ll soon be time to talk to some impressionable young people … Next Thursday will be my first stint as a seminar leader for a course for first-year medical students. I’ll spend a few hours preparing for our session by reading through completed assignments (hopefully) submitted by those students. I’ll also prepare a short presentation for blood donation research colleagues across England on Thursday, and I’ll continue to improve my proposal and code for my planned simulation modelling analyses. Finally, I’ll think through comments and questions from audiences at both of my presentations this week and use them to improve my work.

outside the lab

In a thrilling turn of events this Wednesday, a few fire trucks stopped outside my building and shut down traffic for around a block (everyone seemed to be okay). I managed to reconnect with an old neighbour who was, too, caught in disrupted transport, and we shared a quiet moment on the sidewalk before I rushed off in my high-heeled boots for my presentation.

on the reading list

Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin. 2016. XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ‘16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 785–794. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939785

weekly photo

image His Majesty Silly

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!

november 9, 2024: a week in the life

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Published:

this week

Whew … it’s getting late. It’s almost bedtime and I’m still on my work computer! I would never consider this acceptable normally but have made an exception for this chaotic week. I’ve continued to respond to my supervisor’s comments on my primary analyses, realising that I will need to make substantial changes to the variables used. I’ve also made a dummy dataset that enables me to test my simulation modelling code before I receive the “real” data … though I haven’t done most of that testing yet. And perhaps most importantly, I’ve submitted revisions for our systematic review manuscript, which has now been accepted for publication!!! I hope to share the published paper with you all within the next two weeks.

november 2, 2024: a week in the life

3 minute read

Published:

this week

Time for an apology … I forgot to upload a blog post last week! I have little excuse, except that I had some lovely friends visiting and might have forgotten about this habit amidst the chaos. Anyway, I’m back now, and I come with exciting news! Two reviewers have submitted their comments after I submitted my review manuscript a month ago, and I’ve already begun responding to them. I hope to complete these “minor revisions” (in the journal’s Associate Editor’s words) within a week and move this work closer to publication. During the rest of the week, I’ve been attempting to improve the predictive power of a model I’ve fit within a planned simulation model, revising my thesis draft of my first primary analyses following feedback from my supervisor, conducting a second review of a transfusion-related manuscript, and finalising data access request documents for a near-future (I hope!) project. Things are changing fast, and I’m trying my best to keep up.

october 14, 2024: a week in the life

2 minute read

Published:

this week

I’M BACK! After a period of annual leave from Oct 3-18, I’ve returned to Cambridge and am currently working from my college. In the few days before my travels and the day and a half since, I submitted our review paper for publication, made a lot of slide decks to share proposed ideas with my supervisor, fleshed out a manuscript version of my first primary analysis, and liaised with the undergraduate students who I’ll be leading seminars for in a few weeks :) I kept an eye on emails while away, so I have little to catch up on on that front. I’m still reeling, though, from a pile of outstanding to-dos.

september 28, 2024: a week in the life

2 minute read

Published:

this week

WE’RE GETTING CLOSER! This week, I focussed on addressing the final comments of my co-authors on our systematic review and meta-analysis manuscript. In trying to get back to the flow of things after my week of “conference-holiday”, I also made a million update slides about various proposed analyses for next week’s supervision meeting … Finally, I’ve been preparing to lead seminars for first-year undergraduate medical students by reading through lecture materials, attempting the quizzes they’ll be asked to do, and wrapping my head around the logistics of the Cambridge system.