During my 4-month co-op position at the Ministry of Health on the Public Health Surveillance and Epidemiology team, my primary project was to implement a statistical model for deriving estimates of the mortality rate within small population in BC. The implementation of this model followed the methodology from a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Understanding County-Level, Cause-Specific Mortality".I gained hands on experience specifying generalized linear mixed models using Template Model Builder (TMB). In addition to model specification, I produced a system for validating this model using R, and through this process I further developed my ability to write organized code using the tidyverse libraries.Furthermore, I developed my machine learning and statistical data analysis skills by diagnosing issues with models and adjusting hyperparameters. Through hands-on experience, I learned to identify problems such as overfitting and underfitting, by analyzing metrics and visualizations. This process involved experimenting with different configurations to optimize model performance, enhancing my ability to refine models for improved accuracy and robustness in predictive analytics.

During my 4-month co-op, I successfully led a solo software engineering project to redesign the software for maintaining British Columbia's Chronic Disease Registry, enhancing its performance and maintainability.This self-directed project provided extensive experience in using R to transform and extract information from large datasets. I also gained valuable skills in communicating and visualizing data analysis results through RMarkdown and LaTeX.In developing this software, I identified several structural and logical defects in the existing code. This analysis informed my implementation, allowing me to minimize redundancies and create a maintainable codebase.