The Foundation high school of Doctors of Navarra has awarded the scholarship Senior 2020, in its tenth edition, to Pedro Antonio de la Rosa Fernández-Pacheco, doctor in Preventive Medicine and Public Health and researcher in the project 'Education of the affectivity and human sexuality' of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra.

The financial aid, endowed with 2,500 euros, will allow him to finance part of his postdoctoral training in The Human Flourishing Program (THFP) of the high school of Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard (USA). In fact, he has already begun to work remotely on the analysis of two instructions of data from the ICS, while waiting for the American frontiers to open up to young researchers. 

"Starting in January, I will complete the necessary formalities with the idea of joining the team in person. My stay will end on August 31. The scholarship will help me cover the costs of my travel and stay in Boston," he says.

Epidemiology for the design of health policies.

Specifically, the goal of his stay at Harvard University is the realization of programs of study outcome-wide to analyze the socio-health impact produced by several variables related to the Education of adolescents and the learning of Big Data methodologies (text analysis, machine learning, web scrapping, etc.).

De la Rosa emphasizes that the THFP team leads a pioneeringmodel for the realization of epidemiological programs of study with the approach outcome-wide. "Traditionally, the research of the relationship between health determinants and their consequences has been done through programs of study exposure-wide, which analyzes the possible association of several exposures with a disease," he details. 

He explains that its main drawback is that its usefulness is limited to demonstrating the presence or absence of a relationship between a exhibition of interest and the outcome studied, "leaving out of consideration other possible outcomes of interest that should be studied in future programs of study for which different samples and models will be used". It clarifies that, because of this, its comparability is limited and makes it difficult to make health care decisions. 

To overcome these drawbacks, the Harvard University team has proposed a model with the approach outcome-wide. "The novelty of this proposal is that it allows us to study the effect of a exhibition on several outcomes at the same time, which accelerates the achievement of results at different levels such as health, economic, social, etc.," he says. 

He adds that, in this way, "the development of health policies is facilitated by taking into account the impact that a measure can have on different aspects of the physical, psychological and social health of the population". For example, the different health consequences of different forms of confinement during the pandemic could be measured in a single study.

On his return from the American campus , Pedro de la Rosa aspires to apply the methodologies learned to analyze the data of the project YourLife of the ICS, focused on lifestyles and personal relationships of adolescents in school, in which multiple schools in Navarra are participating. "I hope to be able to contribute quickly to the research in health in Navarra with these techniques," he concludes.