Research IT

Promoting R at the University

The R user community (R.U.M) is one of the most established user groups in CaDiR having previously existed for several years before this as a mailing list group. The group is led by a combination of Research IT members and researchers including Sian Bladon from the School of Health Sciences.

How did you hear about the RUM community?

I came across the RUM (R at University of Manchester) community via Research IT on Twitter/X a few years ago when I was working as a post-doc. There was a call asking for volunteers to be part of the organising group, which I responded too as it would be a good way to meet other R users outside of my division!

What is your role at the University and how does it interact with the RUM community?

I am currently a Lecturer in Health Data Sciences, based in the Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Science, but I have been at the university for a number of years as a student then as a post-doc researcher. I have used R since 2017 for my research and was a complete coding novice so any help was always welcome! I am now involved in teaching R to MSc students on the Health Data Science programme.

How did you get into your domain?

I did an undergraduate degree in Pharmacology and worked in industry for a few years mainly doing lab-based work. I decided this wasn't for me and so came back to university to do my MSc in Health Data Science, as I wanted to work with data whilst remaining in health-related research. Over the last few years I have worked with lots of different types of health data, including routinely collected electronic health record data, and data collected through smartphones and smartwatches. I am really interested in how we can use these vast amounts of data to improve people's health and wellbeing.

What does your role in the RUM group involve?

As a member of the organising committee, I attend monthly meetings where we plan sessions for the wider RUM group, thinking of potential topics and speakers. We try to have talks every 2-3 months throughout the year so we have to liaise with speakers and advertise the talks. I have also given a few talks at previous meetings, mainly on making data visualisations with the ggplot2 package.

What would you like to see the RUM group doing over the next 12 months?

We are planning on inviting an external speaker to give a talk, hopefully in Spring 2026. Depending on interest we have also discussed possibly having longer workshops where people can get some hands on experience using R.

What do you hope to come out the RUM community?

I hope the RUM community provides people with a space where they can get help with R and also learn from each other about how versatile R is, with all of the different packages available and lots of different ways to do the same thing. I personally find it valuable to see how other people approach certain tasks in R so I can improve my abilities!

How can members of the RUM community support you / get involved?

I would encourage people to join the channel on the CaDIR space and post anything R related they want to, whether they need help with something or have an event or resource that may be of interest to others. We are always on the lookout for speakers too, so if anyone would like to present at a future meeting on an R topic or has any suggestions for external speakers then we would love to hear from you!

What do you enjoy most about the RUM group?

I like that there is such a diverse mix of people in the group, from all across the university. Even if you are working in a completely different area of research with different types of data I still find it really interesting hearing about how people are using R!

Discover more about Sian's research and to join the RUM community visit the CaDiR Teams space.

Head and shoulder photo of Sian who is a woman with long dark brown hair and is smiling. She is wearing a dark green cable knit cardigan and a blue and white checked top that ties at the front. The background is slightly out of focus trees.