The Statistical Society of Australia awards the CSIRO/SSA Betty Allan Travel Award to female early career statisticians to support their careers through enabling travel opportunities for professional development.
Our very own Sharmala Thuraisingam was the deserving 2020 recipient of this award.
Sharm is an early career biostatistician and is currently is completing her PhD. In her PhD, she is utilising primary and tertiary care data sets that have been linked with various large-scale national data sets from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry. The linked datasets will be used to develop prediction models for total knee replacement surgery, with a special focus on the use of secondary data from general practice electronic medical records for prediction model development.
She will use the grant to travel to Canada to gain insight on the use of electronic health record data in Canadian medical research. She hopes this will inform the use and analysis of this type of data in Australia, an important aspect that she is addressing in her PhD research. Traveling to Canada will also help her develop her international research profile as an early career biostatistician when she presents her research at the Department of Family Medicine Grand Rounds and the North American Primary Care Research Group Conference.
Good luck Sharm!