A culture for doing good things with data

by Chad Heilig, PhD, 2025-04-24

The why, what, how, and who of a progressive culture for data in public health

Everyone who wants to do good things with data should have the intellectual support to do so; in turn, they must proceed with rigor and stand behind their work.

This is my credo—my fundamental, animating belief in a culture for doing good things with data in public health. This essay lays out my vision for achieving such a culture.

Navigating this essay on the web

The web-based version of this essay features convenient navigation features that adapt to the size of your screen. Links to the previous section and next section appear at the bottom of each page. In a full size browser, the main body appears in a center column, and a table of contents (with live hyperlinks) appears on the left and subsections of the current section (“On this page”) appear on the right. On a smaller screen, the main body could appear with or without the additional navigation on the side. A built-in search box allows you to find specific terms in the essay (e.g., “upper”, a hapax legomenon).

The web version was produced using bookdown through the RStudio, formatted with Bootstrap.

A PDF version of this essay is available, as is a PDF version of the manifesto.

Preface