Biography
I’m James Black, director for Roche’s late-stage Insights codebase and business lead for our clinical and RWD scientific computing environment environments. Previously, I was studying at the MRC Epidemiology Unit/Jesus College, University of Cambridge, worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and did my earlier degrees and schooling in New Zealand.
Interests
- Data to insight flows
- Data Science and Informatics interface
- Pragmatic data science
- Reproducibility
- Real World Data
- Leading technical teams
Education
PhD in Medical Science, 2015
Cambridge University
MPhil in Epidemiology, 2012
Cambridge University
Masters in Public Health, 2010
Otago University
BBioMedSci in Infection & Immunity, 2008
Otago University
Experience
Insights Engineering People and Product Family Lead
Roche / GenentechResponsibilities include:
- Leading a dedicated team of data scientists, developers and engineers that build R/SAS/Python and other language data products for insights
- Business responsible for our Scientific Computing Environment development
- Promote a collaborative codebase, and develop tools, frameworks and mechanisms to support around 1,000 data scientists productionising their code
- Core member of Roche’s Corporate Executive Committee sponsored effort to evaluate our platform and tools across Roche Pharma
- Promote, facilitate and track our internal open source code base
- Represent Pharma Development in Roche’s Inner and Open Source office
Associate Director, Personalised Healthcare Analytics
Roche / GenentechResponsibilities include:
- Leading a team of 10 data scientists and 4 engineers
- Partnering with collaborations group to better understand real world data
- Leading an engineering team responsible for enterprise level dashboards and tools used by >700 internal users
- Driving the insight engineering roadmap, partnering closely with informatics
- Managing data scientists working across the organisation to deliver real world evidence to benefit patients
Data Scientist, Personalised Healthcare Analytics
Roche / GenentechDelivering on molecule needs and supporting development of more robust data science workflows.
Grad Student
MRC Epidemiology Unit | Jesus College, University of CambridgeCompleted MPhil in Epidemiology followed by a PhD exploring individualised care in populations with screen-detected diabetes, with a focus on preventing tertiary outcomes like cardiovascular disease. During my PhD I also undertook teaching opportunities. This included MPhil students, as well as teaching my own one-month course on medical science at a summer school held at Jesus College.
Research Assistant
Health Services Research Centre, Victoria UniversityI analysed the relationship between health-related quality of life and waiting lists for elective surgery. I approached this by using a multi-level mixed effects model to assess the ability of the health system to minimise the burden the waiting list population represents. After completing this project before the end of my contract this was expanded to explore the existence of different health trajectories present after referral using a group-based approach to finite mixture modelling.
Undergrad | Grad Student
School of Medicine, University of OtagoCompleted a BBioMedSci in Infection and Immunity, and a research MPH. My thesis was an individual patient data meta-analysis of patients health related quality of life after injury for a thesis only Masters in Public Health. This thesis aimed to provide a descriptive benchmark of quality of life norms after injury and has since been included as a data source for injury estimates in the GBD-2010 project.
Recent & Upcoming Talks
Recent Posts
Recent Publications
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(2021).
Case study in the development of a framework for quality and reproducibility in inner-sourced packages and self-service analytic dashboards to accelerate common study types.
American Medical Informatics Association Annual Conference.
(2020).
A comparison of sampling methods to select real-world relapsed/refractory (R/R) diffuse large-cell B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) patients with multiple eligible index dates.
Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.
(2018).
Process mining for exploring treatment patterns in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) in a real world oncology database.
34th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management.
(2018).
Validation of Clinical vs Algorithmic Definition of Line of Therapy in Multiple Myeloma.
34th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management.
(2016).
Health Status in Patients with Severe Haemophilia a According to Treatment Regimen and Age.
Value in Health.
Courses
AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
Executive Data Science Capstone
Data Science in Real Life
Building a Data Science Team
Managing Data Analysis
A Crash Course in Data Science
Diversity and inclusion in the workplace
Design and Interpretation of Clinical Trials
DevOps Culture and Mindset
Agile with Atlassian Jira
How to manage a remote team
IT Accelerate - Innovation in IT
Carnegie Mellon
Dec 20172-week onsite in Pittsburgh executive education course run by Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University with 2 month remote project.
Intro to Python for Data Science
DataCamp
Mar 2017Data visualisation with ggplot (part 1)
DataCamp
Mar 2017Data manipulation in R with dplyr
DataCamp
Mar 2017Writing Functions in R
DataCamp
Mar 2017Machine Learning Toolbox
DataCamp
Mar 2017R Programming
Diabetes - a Global Challenge
Coursera
May 2014Diabetes. Diagnosis, Treatment, and Oppurtunities
Coursera
Dec 2013Maps and Geospatial Revolution
Coursera
Aug 2013Contact
- Baden, 5408
- Chat on Keybase