In-person | Fully catered | 5 days | 30 hours | No prior coding experience required
About: A high-impact week of applied programming, data science, and research translation for health, economic, and social scientists.
Dates: 16th-20th March 2026
Times: 09:30-16:30 each day
Location: Nuffield College, Oxford
Lecturers and Convenors: Charles Rahal and Jiani Yan
Setup: Pre-Arrival Guide (Anaconda install). We would also advocate the use of VSCode.
Pre-arrival Reading: The internet is full of a multitude of excellent resources related to how to teach Python, especially for datascience. I learnt from this wonderful book called Python for Informatics by Charles Severance. There is also an excellent Coursera course which accompanies this, which can be found here (also taught by Charles Severance). A colleague of mine (Bernie Hogan) wrote an excellent book called ‘From Social Science to Data Science’ for those of you who are coming from a more social science background. Finally, for those who are interested in a slightly more technical introduction, see Jake VanderPlas’s excellent ‘Python Data Science Handbook’ which we learn on heavily in parts of Lectures 3-5.
Attendance recognition: Accredible badges will be awarded.
Queries: teaching@demography.ox.ac.uk
First Day: Meet at the Porter's lodge at Nuffield College at 09:00! We look forward to welcoming you!
| Day | Location | What Happens | Materials |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 Mon 16 Mar 2026 |
Chester Room, Nuffield College |
09:00: Arrival at the College. 09:30-12:30: Lecture One: Basic object types and an introduction to collections. 12:30-13:30: Lunch at Nuffield. 13:30-15:30: Practical lab exercises for Lecture One content. 15:30-16:30: Research Talk One: Charlie Rahal. |
Lecture Materials Lab Materials Homework |
| Day 2 Tue 17 Mar 2026 |
Chester Room, Nuffield College |
09:30-12:30: Lecture Two: Iterating over a collection, Boolean logic, advanced loops, user input, and error handling. 12:30-13:30: Lunch at Nuffield. 13:30-15:30: Practical lab exercises for Lecture Two content. 15:30-16:30: Research Talk Two: Yuqi Liang. |
Lecture Materials Lab Materials Homework |
| Day 3 Wed 18 Mar 2026 |
Chester Room, Nuffield College |
09:30-12:30: Lecture Three: Pseudocode, functions, file I/O, programming outside of Juypter, and Numpy. 12:30-14:00: Lunch at Nuffield. 14:00-15:00: Metrics and Models Seminar. 15:00-17:00: Practical lab exercises for Lecture Three content. |
Lecture Materials Lab Materials Homework |
| Day 4 Thu 19 Mar 2026 |
Lecture Room, Nuffield College |
09:30-12:30: Lecture Four: Random numbers, webscraping, and Pandas. 12:30-13:30: Lunch at Nuffield. 13:30-15:30: Practical lab exercises for Lecture Four content. 15:30-16:30: Research Talk Four: Jiani Yan. |
Lecture Materials Lab Materials Homework |
| Day 5 Fri 20 Mar 2026 |
Chester Room, Nuffield College |
09:30-12:30: Lecture Five: Matplotlib, statsmodels, RobustiPy, NLTK, and scikit-learn. 12:30-13:30: Lunch at Nuffield. 13:30-15:30: Practical lab exercises for Lecture Five content. 15:30-16:30: Research Talk Five: Daniel Valdenegro. |
Lecture Materials Lab Materials |
