Diogo Nogueira Leite
I contact with the HEADS on January 24, 2020, when I accompanied the European deputy, and at the time my boss, Maria Manuel Leitão Marques, in a keynote that I would give at the University Hospital Center of São João at a conference on the use and reuse of secondary health data to boost research in Medicine, promoted by CINTESIS.
I was already fascinated by the intersection between health and digital since 2016, and since then I had been following a path in this direction. That path led me to coordinate the ‘Emerging Technologies’ branch in the 2019 edition of SIMPLEX, and later to follow the folders related to digital at the European Parliament in Brussels.
My curiosity grew exponentially and, upon arriving in Porto and seeing a newly conceived doctoral program dedicated precisely to these themes – on top of that with a branch dedicated to Health Interventions, Management and Policies – I realized that my next step was this way. So I decided to combine my intellectual curiosity with the desire to pursue a PhD that would allow me to have a substantial impact on health and the digital. And since then I haven’t looked back.
João Alves
In my professional activities, I have always relied upon data gathering and analysis, but nothing compared to the set of methodologies and tools employed in Data Science. Within the programme, I’ve been immersed in a wealth of learning materials, along with multiple practical assignments, that definitely improved my knowledge and experience both in this field and in the singularities of its application to healthcare. As a result, I feel that I’m constantly improving my skills on how to better extract meaningful insights from health data.
João Almeida
With HEADS I managed to acquire technical and scientific skills to transform clinical data into health decisions. Through these skills and the relationship with the faculty and students, I managed to adapt to the new paradigm of digital health and realized that there is immense unexplored potential as a health data scientist. During the doctoral program, practical knowledge is imparted to us to modernize the current scenario of evidence-based medic.