This summer I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jennifer Gardy and her team on research involving tuberculosis and whole genome sequencing (part MPH practicum and part PHPM residency rotation). During this rotation I helped lead a project to develop a lab report template for clinical data resulting from a novel WGS pipeline at Public Health England. This follows from the COMPASS-TB study, which compared a WGS diagnostic pipeline for TB to the standard diagnostic approach, demonstrating that this can be done faster and more cost effectively. My interest in this project related to the difficulty with translating complicated WGS data into something that can be interpreted by clinical and public health practitioners.
ASCII John Snow
Following the first phase of the project, we created a new blog to present our results and other public health info’s projects that the team is working on. As one of the first posts, Dr. Gardy wrote a fantastic piece on the role of visualization in public health. This post really emphasizes how innovative breakthroughs (such as whole genome sequencing) aren’t useful until they can be implemented and translated into something frontline workers can interpret.
I also had fun creating the new logo – ASCII John Snow!