Dr Joram Posma - Biomedical Research
Meet Dr Joram Posma
What course do you teach on and what is your role?
I co-lead the Data Science stream of MRes in Biomedical Research, I am a lecturer for both stream-specific sessions and bioinformatics sessions for the entire MRes, I am also the personal tutor for the MRes. In addition, I teach a module on Biomedical Data Science on the BSc in Medical Biosciences and the AI session for the iExplore STEMM Personalised Medicine course for undergraduates.
How has your career led you to teaching?
In my role as Senior Lecturer, I lead a research team consisting of postdoctoral researchers, and PhD, master and undergraduate students. As part of the development of new methods in data science, I also need to train the next generation of data scientists so that they can develop their own methods. So my teaching focuses on passing on the core skills needed to develop machine learning and bioinformatics algorithms with a backing of 'traditional' (multivariate) statistics.
What aspect of the course do you enjoy teaching the most?
As part of most of my sessions there is an interactive element, either a tutorial or live group assignment, and the outcomes of these are hard to predict so having an open discussion about the results or findings with the students is a lot of fun.
What do you hope your students will go on to achieve on completion of this course?
Our past Data Science stream students of the MRes in Biomedical Research have gone on to both industry (multinational companies and start-ups alike) and PhDs and pre-doctoral fellowships, so it is not so much of a hope, but an anticipation of the continuation of this where our students will find employment or further study opportunities after our course.
What is your favourite part about teaching at Imperial College London?
Being enabled to use a mixture of teaching methods, from lectures paired with tutorials to group assignments and journal clubs. When Imperial students are challenged to come up with something new, they usually do - therefore I use real data so that the results obtained are valuable.