Director's Message

Data and computational literacy are increasingly valuable skills — in particular for understanding the drivers of population health. However, the work conducted by data scientists is often influenced by their isolation from those who come from different communities, those who hold different training experiences or expertise and those who hold a different perspective or priority. Therefore, more than ever, we must find ways to connect and work with each other — across campuses, across disciplines and across communities. Utilizing large and complex datasets or advanced modeling approaches to understand the health of populations requires transdisciplinary collaboration that unites social scientists and health researchers with in-depth knowledge of the populations and the systems under investigation and investigators who are at the forefront of innovative data collection and analytic techniques.

Collaboration across diverse disciplines, expertise and experience does not come easy, however. It requires intentional and sustained effort to build shared spaces where scientific disciplines can complement one another and be refined by the perspective of experts directly embedded within communities of focus. It requires the building of trust, the development of shared language and the slow uncovering and integration of each other’s perspectives and priorities. The COMPASS Center aims to cultivate these spaces to build greater understanding, collaboration and impact — uniting faculty and trainees across social science, data science and population health, allowing people with diverse perspectives to gather and bringing data scientists, domain experts and community leaders into conversation with each other so that we can build relationships, educate each other and enhance our research impact.

Beyond building transdisciplinary collaborative spaces, we aim to train the next generation of diverse population health scholars to become skilled in the responsible application of cutting-edge computational methodologies to understand health of populations. In particular, we are interested in supporting scholars who connect Northwestern mentors across disciplines and across campuses. We equally prioritize building trainee competency across population health, advanced computational and social and behavioral science methodologies, and transdisciplinary collaboration.

If you are interested in joining us, please join our membership list. If you can think of ways of partnering, please don’t hesitate to contact us at compass-center@northwestern.edu.