Certificate in Data Analytics, University of Pennsylvania ’24
Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, Pt. B. D. Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences ’02
As a full-time faculty member at the Perelman School of Medicine, Dr. Sandeep Aggarwal (Certificate in Data Analytics ’24) balances clinical practice with teaching and pursuing medical research. For studies that focus on cardiovascular health outcomes in patients with kidney disease, Sandeep often works with data analytics experts—but wanted to understand more. “I thought that there are a few skill sets that I should possess as a clinical researcher,” he explains. The Certificate in Data Analytics allowed him to develop those skills over the course of a year without interrupting his demanding schedule as faculty, researcher, and clinician.
Although Sandeep had some informal training in data science and had used statistical suites in his work, he had minimal experience in coding and data visualization before starting the certificate. “I was a little bit nervous—but within the first couple of classes, I knew it was for me,” he recalls. “In every one of those classes, there were bits and pieces there that I really enjoyed and found useful immediately.” The Certificate in Data Analytics is unusual among Penn LPS Online offerings in that the four courses must be taken sequentially, starting with DATA 1010: Introduction to Data Analytics; Sandeep warmly recommends taking all four. “The knowledge stacks on, course after course,” he notes. “The first two courses build a very strong foundation so that you can play around in the third and fourth courses. The advanced data analytics was a lot more fun.”
As an example of fun with data, Sandeep and his team have begun using word clouds to creatively analyze and visualize electronic data from patient charts and medical records. “The word cloud concept is not new, but it was new for me. Using them to see what words or phrases are used in patient charts and how closely those words correlate to disease and prognosis has given us surprising results,” he says. “This task that used to be almost impossible to do is now possible, and it’s giving us information beyond what we thought we would be able to acquire.”
As another example, Sandeep and his colleagues wanted to examine a matter of social behavior in the medical profession, analyzing how formally or informally medical panel speakers are addressed by moderators. Their initial analysis of three different conference years revealed a gender discrepancy, with informal addresses generally directed more toward women than toward men. Applying a different analytical framework revealed additional information: “When I used R and very basic visualization tools that we were taught in class, we saw a very different pattern emerge in 2021,” says Sandeep. “In the mostly virtual meetings that year, everyone interacted very formally, most likely due to the effect of teleprompters or scripts. This was a very interesting observation.” Their paper, “Exploring Unconscious Bias at International Kidney Conference: A Retrospective Analysis,” has since been published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Certificate students are encouraged to bring professional or academic projects such as this one into the classroom, where they can benefit from different perspectives and problem-solving approaches. “People from every sphere of life and profession were present: There were physicians, and students actively working in the fields of science or humanities or liberal arts, full-time professionals who either directly or indirectly deal with data on a day-to-day basis. The cohort was not only diverse professionally but geographically; we had a whole bunch of international students,” remembers Sandeep. “They all brought different creative ways of looking at the same set of numbers to tell a story. And when there is an effort made to foster an environment where people are collaborative and understand one another’s point of view, that takes your learning to another level.” In addition, Sandeep valued the availability and support of the course instructors. “All the faculty members and teaching assistants were very open to us discussing our work-related projects,” he says. “If we were stuck on something, they were more than happy to help us out, but they also helped us navigate through problems and find solutions by ourselves.”
After completing his certificate in 2024, Sandeep has continued to find applications for his new base of knowledge. When working with a data analytics team in his research, he can ask better questions; when working with trainees, he can teach them statistical methods. “I personally feel more productive, as far as research is concerned,” he adds, “and I think it’s easier for me to learn new things and create new projects for myself.”
To that end, Sandeep is planning to apply to the Executive Master of Public Administration at Fels Institute of Government, a low-residency degree that will expand his data science education into the realm of public policy. “I had some interest in public policy before, but the courses just make you so much more inquisitive about things and gave me the foundation to pursue it in the long term,” he says. “Data is everywhere, but the way you visualize data in social and policy matters is different than how you look at data from a research study in medicine.”
