Hi everyone, below is the content of the July Data Community Newsletter we sent out via email on July 9th. Let us know if you didn’t receive it, or if you have topics you’d like to see in future newsletters!
July 2025 Data Community Newsletter
Join A Community Task Force!
As our community enters its third year, our task forces are continuing their work to produce resources for PD researchers. These efforts rely on member contribution and we hope you’ll join one (or more) detailed below:
- Mentorship and Training - Led by: @psaffie & @malosco
- The goal of this task force is to develop resources (and opportunities) for the training and mentorship of researchers. Are you seeking mentorship, need additional expertise to support someone in your lab, or interested in becoming a mentor yourself? If so, we hope you’ll join this group!
- Data Modality and Methodology - Led by: @ehutchins and @hirotaka
- This group brings together researchers interested in building tools (e.g., Open Science Guide, useful PPMI codes), workflows (e.g., Parkinson’s Insight Engine, GitHub project template, imaging processing repository), and examples to support reproducible, collaborative analysis of Parkinson’s data across different modalities and analysis approaches. Do you have a methodology you’d like to publish on, a pipeline or code you’d like to share with the community or get colleague input on? If so, please indicate your interest in joining via the link above.
- Networking and Outreach - Led by: @Vidash and @ecebayram
- This group is tasked with expanding our community over the next year and increasing engagement of existing members by identifying and recruiting new members from diverse professional backgrounds and geographic regions, enhancing collaboration opportunities, and supporting professional growth through targeted outreach efforts and networking activities. Are you interested in helping grow our community while expanding your own network? Join the team via the link above!
- Visual Resource Generation - Led by: @vdardov and @paularp
- This task force’s objective is to produce visual resources that will aid researchers in comprehending the complex topics discussed in our community. Task force members are working together in designing, generating, reviewing and distributing resources such as webinars, tutorials and more. Do you have a visual resource you’d like to share and/or create with the community? Get involved in the task force thread (linked above)!
Are you interested in standing up a task force on another topic? If so, please reach out to: researchcommunity@michaeljfox.org. We would love to discuss this with you and are able to provide operational support to support executing on your vision!
Community Programming
Do you work with PPMI data and investigate subtyping in Parkinson’s disease? If so, join us on Tuesday, July 15th, 1:00-2:00pm (EDT) for our next community webinar as we hear from Dr. Victoria Catterson (@vcatterson), VP of Research at BioSymetics Inc. Dr. Catterson will be presenting her team’s work on a phenoclustering analysis of PPMI data for PD subtyping. For more details, check out the thread on Discourse.
We will also have a webinar focusing on open science on Monday, August 11th, 2:00-3:00pm (EDT). We will be hearing from community members Dr. Matt Kmiecik (@mattk) and Dr. Hirotaka Iwaki (@hirotaka) as they present their work Open Science Guide: An Online Book for Transparent and Reproducible Data Science Projects in Parkinson’s Disease. You can read more and sign up to join here!
In case you missed our webinar last month, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Tristan Glatard (@glatard) and Mathieu Dugré, as they presented their project LivingPark, an MJFF-supported open source tool which enables users to directly pull PPMI data and conduct novel and/or replicative anlayses within Jupyter notebooks. You can access the recorded webinar here and join the discussion on Discourse!
Resources and Ongoing Conversations
- @juschuma asked about LEDD medication logs in PPMI.
- @odevine shared an invitation to The Research Roadmap, a panel discussion around career opportunities in the PD research field.
- @fbbriggs and other members discussed visualization software for metabolomic data.
- @Vidash shared some of the challenges clinicians may face when returning research results to the public and patients.
- @ecebayram shared Society for Equity Neuroscience training opportunities for US- and Africa-based researchers.
Welcome New Members!
We encourage you to reach out to our new members and extend a warm welcome to the community! Some of our new members include:
- @Roberta_Repossi (Sant Joan de Deu Research Institute)
- @SidKarthik (New York University)
- @ZhengjieYang (Universitätsmedizin Berlin - Charité)
- @Yayoi_Sakaki (Armengaud Innovate GmbH)
- @VidyadharaDJ (Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science)
That’s it for now – thanks for being members of our growing community. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, we look forward to hearing from you! If you know of colleagues or other researchers who would be interested in joining, feel free to direct them to https://rcop.michaeljfox.org/ where they can set up an account.