Trainee Resources
Webinars and Resources created by shAIRe
Explore training sessions, practical tools, and knowledge resources designed by shAIRe to advance trainee's competence in handling lung health data in research.
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Click here for shAIRe webinar: Learn about CANUE!
Join Dr. Dany Doiron and Joey Syer as they introduce and discuss the use of the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) for respiratory research.
Original webinar hosted by shAIRe on February 24th, 2026.
The Canadian Network for Statistical Training in Trials (CANSTAT) is a pan-Canadian, multi-institutional and multidisciplinary training platform that will provide participants with the technical skills and practical experience needed to become leaders in their field and to ensure that clinical trials generate the highest-quality evidence to improve the health of Canadians.
The goals of the program are to equip fellows with:
- Knowledge about clinical trials
- Required technical and interpersonal skills
- Opportunities to implement skills into practice
The CANSTAT program will bring fellows together with clinical and statistical experts in clinical trials and allow fellows to learn through a comprehensive experiential learning program. Formal education will also be provided through workshops led by clinical trial experts from around the world, and though in-person capacity-building meetings.
Upon completion of the program, fellows will be prepared to work as professionals in biostatistics as effective collaborators, communicators, scholars and leaders who will contribute significantly to academic and industry clinical trials in Canada.
At CANTRAIN (The CANadian Consortium of Clinical Trial TRAINing Platform), we believe the future of clinical trials in Canada depends on how we train, connect and prepare people to engage in clinical trials research—across disciplines, across sectors, and across communities.
Born from a national wake-up call during the COVID-19 pandemic, CANTRAIN is Canada’s most expansive and innovative response to the urgent need for a stronger, more coordinated clinical trials system.
AI4PH is pleased to offer a suite of free, short courses for graduate students, public health professionals, data science professionals who want to develop their skills and understanding in AI, public health and equity in order to apply them in their research and practice. This program is concerned with transformative change in addressing population and public health challenges and understanding how these tools impact health equity.
These free courses are offered throughout the year and require an application.
The Canadian Bioinformatics Hub is Canada’s platform for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Life and Health and Data Science skills and community development. The platform is built on the two foundational pillars of Training and Community, both governed by an overarching Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) Framework.
Canadian Bioinformatics Hub Website
The Canadian EQUATOR Centre is on initiatives that have relevant down stream consequences for the conduct and reporting of biomedical research. Our current programs include:
- A broad research program on deceptive journals and publishers
- A program on peer review, including how it is measured; and developing core competencies for peer reviewers
- Investigating how to reduce waste and increase value in biomedical research
- A comprehensive training and education program on journalology
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UCLA Statistical Methods and Data Analytics: Which Statistical Test to Use?
The table below covers a number of common analyses and helps you choose among them based on the number of dependent variables (sometimes referred to as outcome variables), the nature of your independent variables (sometimes referred to as predictors). You also want to consider the nature of your dependent variable, namely whether it is an interval variable, ordinal or categorical variable, and whether it is normally distributed (see What is the difference between categorical, ordinal and interval variables? for more information on this). The table then shows one or more statistical tests commonly used given these types of variables (but not necessarily the only type of test that could be used) and links showing how to do such tests using SAS, Stata and SPSS.
UCLA Statistical Methods and Data Analytics: Annotate Output
These pages contain example programs and output with footnotes explaining the meaning of the output. This is to help you more effectively read the output that you obtain and be able to give accurate interpretations.
UCLA Statistical Methods and Data Analytics: Data Analysis Examples
The pages contain examples (often hypothetical) illustrating the application of different statistical analysis techniques using different statistical packages. Each page provides a handful of examples of when the analysis might be used along with sample data, an example analysis and an explanation of the output, followed by references for more information. These pages merely introduce the essence of the technique and do not provide a comprehensive description of how to use it.
UCLA Statistical Methods and Data Analytics: Textbook Examples
This page lists all of the books and papers for which we have developed web pages showing how to solve the examples using common statistical packages. We encourage you to obtain the textbooks or papers associated with these pages to gain a deeper conceptual understanding of the analyses illustrated. We are very grateful to the authors of these textbooks and papers for granting us permission to create these pages and to distribute their data files via our web pages. These books are just some of the books available for you to borrow via our Statistics Books for Loan.
UCLA Statistical Methods and Data Analytics: Upcoming and Past Seminars
Upcoming and past seminars available through UCLA Advanced Research Computing.
HarvardX: Causal Diagrams
Causal diagrams have revolutionized the way in which researchers ask: What is the causal effect of X on Y? They have become a key tool for researchers who study the effects of treatments, exposures, and policies. By summarizing and communicating assumptions about the causal structure of a problem, causal diagrams have helped clarify apparent paradoxes, describe common biases, and identify adjustment variables. As a result, a sound understanding of causal diagrams is becoming increasingly important in many scientific disciplines.
Click here for a free audit of the course
Causal Inference: What If? Textbook by Miguel A. Hernan & James M. Robins
We expect that the book will be helpful to anyone interested in causal inference, including epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, computer scientists… The book is divided in three parts of increasing difficulty: (1) causal inference without models, (2) causal inference with models, and (3) causal inference from complex longitudinal data.
Click here to access free download
Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course by Richard McElreath
This is a series of online Youtube lectures by Richard McElreath that covers lecture style versions of his textbook.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) provides standardized and actionable data and information to drive improvements in health care, health system performance and population health across Canada. They offer educational courses on our current databases, methodologies, reports, and many other topics in an online format, as well as instructor-led web conferences and in-person workshops.
CIHI News, Events and Education
Boston University School of Public Health
Teaching Public Health offers free asynchronous online courses open to learners from any sector and with varying levels of public health knowledge. We offer a wide range of learning opportunities that focus on career-enhancing skills, from planning effective, evidence-based interventions to data analysis and reporting.
European Respiratory Society upcoming scientific workshop, 'Revolutionising respiratory trials and clinical practice: practical strategies for digital endpoints and decentralised designs', taking place online on 29 January, 2026.
Through expert talks, technology demos, regulatory insights and condition-specific discussions, this workshop aims to:
- build a global multidisciplinary network for digital endpoint innovation;
- validate regulatory pathways for decentralised trials;
- design equitable frameworks for implementation across all countries/income settings;
- and launch a taskforce with the American Thoracic Society (ATS) to set global standards for digital endpoints in respiratory disease.
This workshop will be of interest to a wide range of clinicians, researchers, decision-makers, industry innovators, patients and advocates.
Maelstrom Rmonize is an R package that supports structured and well documented processing of data from individual studies into a common harmonized format. It provides functions to prepare and validate the required inputs and produce harmonized datasets and documentation based on the user-specified list of variables to generate and elements and algorithms for data processing. Rmonize also includes functions to identify potential processing issues and produce descriptive summaries and visual reports of harmonized variables. As such, Rmonize provides a streamlined reusable pipeline that helps users to improve the efficiency, consistency, and transparency of their harmonization initiative
Maelstrom Mica is a software application used to create online portals for individual epidemiological studies or multi-study networks. It helps investigators and data custodians efficiently disseminate information about their studies and networks. As such, Mica allows annotation, organization, and dissemination of study and variable metadata. A web-based search interface then allows users to browse and query this metadata, thereby helping them identify studies and data items of interest to answer their research questions. Mica also includes other useful communication and dissemination features.
Maelstrom Opal is a software application used to manage, harmonize, and integrate epidemiological study data. As a central study data repository, Opal allows users to import, validate, derive, analyze, and export data. Opal provides a uniform interface capable of integrating data collected from multiple sources for a single study, and enables the derivation of common-format (i.e., harmonized) data across multiple studies. The Opal application also provides a state-of-the-art software infrastructure for data encryption, participant-identifier management (with import and export functions), and user authentication/authorization.
CANUE provides researchers with access to standardized, analysis-ready environmental exposure data covering all of Canada. This includes concentrations of key air pollutants (e.g., PM₂.₅, NO₂, ozone), land use, green space, noise, and climate variables, all indexed to six-character postal codes. Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) data are pre-linked to major Canadian cohort studies and administrative health databases that include measures and outcomes relevant to lung health. Researchers can also request customized datasets to link with their own study populations. These resources support high-quality, reproducible research on the environmental determinants of respiratory health.
The HDR UK Phenotype Library is a platform to host phenotyping algorithms and harness their power for research. Our aim is to provide researchers with the “GitHub of phenotyping”: an open platform for creation, storage, dissemination, re-use, evaluation, and citation of curated algorithms and metadata. Our goal is for this to be a place where researchers can share their own work, benefit from what others have shared, and even build new collaborations.
As a funded project of HDRUK, our primary goal is to develop a national platform supporting researchers within the United Kingdom, but we don’t want to stop there: we welcome contributions from members of the health research community worldwide.
External Resources for Trainees
Access a collection of curated and trusted resources and learning materials to support data-driven respiratory research.