Welcome to R for Public Health

R for public health is a new course for 2026, created by the PHAC-ROEMB Training and Development Unit.

Join us for three days of instruction and practice in R as we follow a case study that takes us aboard the S. S. Rainbow Cake, introduces us to her mysterious crew, and tracks an unknown disease aboard the vessel.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Apply a Tidyverse workflow to set up and manage an efficient R project for public health investigations.
2. Discuss strengths and caveats of using AI coding assistants in public health investigations.
3. Analyze and clean various datasets, preparing them for epidemiological analysis by identifying missing data, assessing quality, and transforming variables.
4. Use coding tools to explore how publication quality tables and reports can be automated using flextable and RMarkdown.