Achievement

During fall 2011, IGERT faculty Paul Voss taught for the second time his "Bayes for Beginners" short course. Professor Voss writes: "We commenced the course on the premise that few class participants had any knowledge of the Bayesian analytic paradigm. The educational achievements included a basic understanding of the theory and rationale behind Bayesian modeling and Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation. Most of the illustrations used came from environmental or disease mapping applications." Led by members of the “Bayes for Beginners” short course, a new working group on Bayesian cluster detection methods formed during the current reporting year. Led by CPC postdoctoral scholars, Carolina Perez-Heydrich and Veronica Escamilla (former IGERT trainee), the workshop meets approximately once per week to examine methods of cluster analysis, disease incidence scanning, syndromic surveillance, and related cluster detection methodologies.