Getting data science support

Image inspired by Bristol students' data visualisations

Our team at the Jean Golding Institute can help support your projects in a number of ways:

We can provide a wide range of data science and data intensive research expertise, including: 

Free Support

Free one day of support from our Ask-JGI “ask a data scientist” service for all staff and doctoral students at the University of Bristol. Supported by our team of postgraduates and supervised by our data scientists.

We can help with: 

    • Troubleshooting – Collaborating with researchers from different disciplines and of varying expertise, to find out what they need to do to solve their problem. 
    • Study design and planning – Providing statistical advice on experimental design. Identifying potential data hazards and ethical issues. 
    • Data cleaning and management – Helping to develop pipelines to make raw data ready for analysis. Advice on data management plans and data governance. 
    • Data analysis – Recommending or providing support with tools and methods for modelling, AI/machine learning and statistics. This might involve multilevel modelling, bioinformatics, GIS, NLP, random forests, deep learning, use of LLMs, or mixed/qualitative methods. 
    • Programming – Technical support and coding in (primarily) Python or R. But this could include other tools like SQL, MATLAB, SPSS, STATA, NVivo, Excel, C, Rust, Bash scripts etc. Code review and code optimisation. Deployment to HPC. 
    • Best practices – Giving advice on best practices for writing reproducible research code and creating packages. Support with tools like Git, GitHub, virtual environments and Conda, Docker. 
    • Data communication – Help with data visualisation. Providing advice with dashboards or websites. 

Costed support

Suitable if you need a task completed that is either short-term or does not require extensive domain knowledge:

  1. Flexible, ad-hoc support costed from your existing research grants (conditional on the availability of a suitable data scientist)
  2. Planned, costed support from data scientists for your project (for example: 1 day per week for 3 months)
  3. Long term data science support - Extended data scientist integration into your project or group (for example: 50% FTE for 2 years)

The above are examples of what we can offer, and we would try to be flexible if your needs are different.  Please contact ask-jgi@bristol.ac.uk to find out more about how we can support you.