Wednesday 21 February 2018

Commonwealth Games

Earlier this week, we found out that we have secured the Commonwealth Share Scholarship for our Master Programme in Health Economics & Decision Science.

The Commonwealth Shared Scholarship Scheme is a joint initiative between the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (with funding from the Department for International Development (DFID), and UK universities, to support scholarships for students from developing Commonwealth countries who would not otherwise be able to study in the United Kingdom.

The aim of the scheme is to assist students from developing Commonwealth countries who are of excellent academic calibre but for financial reasons would not otherwise be able to afford to study in the United Kingdom. The scheme allows them to benefit from postgraduate study at a university in the United Kingdom which will help them to contribute toward the development of their home countries.

Applicants must:

  • Be a Commonwealth citizen, refugee, or British protected person;
  • Be permanently resident in a developing Commonwealth country (for a full list of eligible countries, see the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission terms and conditions;
  • Be available to start your academic studies in the UK by the start of the UK academic year in September/October 2018;
  • By August 2018, hold a first degree of either first or upper second class (2:1) classification, or lower second class (2:2) classification plus a relevant postgraduate qualification (usually a Master’s degree);
  • Not have studied or worked for one (academic) year or more in a developed country;
  • Be unable, either yourself or through your family, to pay to study in the UK.
More info here.

Wednesday 7 February 2018

Significance early-career writing competition

We've just issued the call for entries for our 2018 writing competition for early-career statisticians. Details of the competition are available online here.

The competition is open to: (1) Students currently studying for a first degree, Master's or PhD in statistics or related subjects; and (2) Graduates whose last qualification in statistics or related subjects (whether first degree, Master's or PhD) was not more than five years ago.

Last year’s winner, Kevin Lin, analysed user activity on the social media site, Reddit, to see whether young people were now more engaged with political news and topics. The year before that, Adam B. Kashlak won for his analysis of State of the Union addresses throughout history, showing how use of the word “America” by sitting US presidents had increased over time.

The closing date is 28 May 2018.

Tuesday 6 February 2018

Acro-juggling

Yesterday, we held our UCL Health Economics Network Symposium. 

Kobi has been poorly since Friday, which of course has coincide with a particularly busy week end/start to the new week... Sunday night was particularly bad and we managed to accomplish a trip to A&E (luckily all is good) and some healthy running around so that someone was at home with him at any given time, while teaching and, in fact, going to the Symposium (the picture to the left shows Marta and I practising our acro-juggling...).

Anyway, despite being low on sleep and rather high on coffee, I managed to talk about our work on Bayesian modelling on missing data in health economic evaluation and our research group in general $-$ Anna and Spyros also presented nice posters about their respective work. Copies of the slides that were presented yesterday are also available here.

I think the event (or to be more precise, what I managed to catch of it) was very interesting and we attracted a varied range of people from within and outside academia, which was really one of the main objectives. And I think the plan is to turn this into an annual event.