Academics from around the globe – including the UTS School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences – are using statistics to work out how to give children everywhere an equal chance to thrive.
Helping children thrive
UTS Professor Louise Ryan loves using the power of mathematics and statistics to find simple solutions to complicated real-world problems.
“I get a lot of satisfaction from translating complex questions into something quantifiable, then using the data to answer those questions," says Professor Ryan.
It was precisely this kind of expertise the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation needed for their Healthy Birth, Growth, and Development knowledge integration initiative (HBGDki), which aims to better understand the factors that prevent kids from thriving. As a part of this global initiative, in 2016 Professor Ryan and her team at UTS were given a $1.26 million grant to analyse data from studies around the world, and develop evidence-based tools to identify effective strategies for intervention.
“The goal was to create a resource that would integrate lots of studies from many different interdisciplinary perspectives,” explains Professor Ryan. “This data sharing platform would then provide a powerful framework to begin asking questions beyond the scope of any individual study – in this case, interventions to support children in developing countries to grow and thrive.”
Using data to improve children’s health
Due to the burden of disease and malnutrition in low-income countries, every year a staggering 15 million premature babies are born, 150 million children have stunted growth, and 600 million children have impaired neurocognitive development – leaving entire generations far behind in reaching their potential.[1]
“This data sharing platform would then provide a powerful framework to begin asking questions beyond the scope of any individual study.”
Spearheaded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the HBGDki initiative aimed to address these three health issues by collating data from 170 studies, involving 11 million subjects across the world, while also drawing on expertise from diverse disciplines, including statistics, epidemiology, pharmacology and biology.
“Understanding the biological, social and environmental factors influencing poor growth in children – both negatively and positively – and the effect they can have on health and cognition in later life is essential to developing the most effective interventions,” explains Professor Ryan.
As a part of this initiative, over 100 data scientists around the world were tasked with analysing data sets that would ultimately help develop nutritional, medical and even educational interventions. Professor Ryan and her team at the UTS School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences led the Sydney arm of this mission.
“We were really passionate about understanding what factors make children thrive, and identifying strategies that could help ensure the best outcome,” says Professor Ryan. “Being able to find early markers of whether a child may have a health problem or intellectual impairment down the line is very powerful.”
Shaping the future of research
The Gates Foundation’s grant has been an important stepping stone for Professor Ryan’s work in children’s health. She’s now using the same technical tools in her current research, which focuses on the effect of prenatal alcohol on childhood development.
“While working on HBGDki we came up with ways to build meta-analysis models, which allow for a high degree of diversity among the studies. Now, we're refining those methods in this research.”
Ryan says that grants from philanthropic organisations like the Gates Foundation can help to shape the nature of research.
“For researchers, projects funded by philanthropic grants like this are more collaborative and powerful. We are answering broader themes and questions, and it's not as precisely controlled. This gives you the opportunity to be a little bit more creative in refining the question. And it opens up new exploration possibilities that might never have been found within a traditional research route.”
