CORE convenes several Research Groups aimed at supporting research focused on specific topics of interest. The goals of the Research Groups are to:

  • Foster transdisciplinary collaboration within & beyond the MMC community.
  • Share expertise & learning.
  • Provide professional development opportunities.
  • Communicate & disseminate research findings.

R User Group

Description:
R is an open source statistical programming language used in a wide range of applications from scientific research to business analytics. The MMC R User Group is a resource for new and existing R users in the MaineHealth system who are interested in integrating R into their work. In 2020, the group will focus on getting back to R basics and practical applications of R in research workflows.

Meeting Schedule & Topics

1/14/20 | #TidyTuesday: Tidy and explore a fun dataset and get back to your basic R skills in this interactive session. Please bring a laptop with R if able.

2/11/20 | Writing functions

3/10/20 | Slide over, PowerPoint: Making presentation slides with R

4/2/20   | Open coding session

4/14/20 | R and open science

4/16/20 | Open coding session

5/12/20 | Git workflows and reproducible research: Lessons from IDEXX

5/18/20 | Open coding session

5/26/20 | Handling time series data in R

6/9/20   | Open coding session

6/23/20 | R for beginners

7/14/20 | Guest speaker: Louisa Smith

8/18/20 | Open coding session

9/15/20 | Special Topics in Data Visualization

10/5/20 | Open coding session

10/27/20 | RStudio Workshop: Foundations of R Workflow

11/10/20 | RStudio Workshop: Introduction to Shiny

11/16/20 | Open coding session

12/1/20 | RStudio Workshop: Workflows with RStudio Connect

12/17/20 | End of the year gathering and code sharing

Location:
Meeting virtually on Zoom. Meeting details sent to email list.

Facilitator:
Jaclyn Janis, Research Data Analyst at CORE, jjanis@mmc.org. Contact Jaclyn to be added to our email list.

2019 Highlights

A Data Carpentry Workshop was held at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute on April 2, 2019. It was sponsored by the Northern New England Center for Translational Research. The full day workshop explored ideas in reproducible analysis workflows using git and R. The course instructor was Nick Potter with help from Eric Anderson, and Dave Denton of the Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation (CORE).

View the full workshop:

Resources

Download R and RStudio
A Beginner’s Guide to R
R for Data Science
DataCamp: Online tutorials
R courses on Coursera
Join the Greater Portland UseR Group on Meetup

CORE Junior Investigator Group

The CORE junior investigator group supports early career researchers in grant writing, research tools, productivity, and career development. The group’s monthly meetings include presentations by guest speakers and open group discussions. The group has let to the founding of a separate writing group that focuses on grant and manuscript preparation and peer-review feedback.

Schedule: Contact facilitators for more information.

Location: CORE Conference Room, 509 Forest Ave, suite 200

Facilitators:
Eric Anderson,  EAnderson@mmc.org
Bree Taylor, BJTaylor@mmc.org

Qualitative Research Interest Group

This Research Interest Group focuses on qualitative research in health care. Specific areas of interests include data collection strategies (e.g. focus group interviews) and analysis methods (e.g. Grounded Theory, Phenomenology, Delphi Technique) in qualitative research.

Schedule: Every other month on the 4th Thursday of the month, from 4:00-5:30 pm

Location: Maine Medical Center, Dana Center

Organizers:
Sarah Hallen,  halles@mmc.org
Kristiina Hyrkas,  hyrkak@mmc.org

Biostatistics and Epidemiology

To provide a forum for discussion of statistical issues, questions and techniques that arise during the design and analysis of epidemiological or health services research data.

We meet quarterly on a biostatistical topic or question of interest to outcomes and health services research. Discussions are typically lead by one or two people and may involve introduction to statistical topics or techniques, explanation of computer code in particular statistical packages for solving specific questions, case studies or examples or data analysis techniques, and any topic of interest for continuing education and training in biostatistics.

Organizer:
Christine Lary,  CLary@mmc.org

Schedule: Third Wednesday of the month each quarter, 10:00-11:00 am

Location: CORE Conference Room, 509 Forest Ave, Suite 200, Portland