Week 1 – Introduction to Project

19 Jun 2026 - Sneha Dharmeche - Learning, introduction, R, Python

What is my project about?

This week marked the official start of my In2Research internship! I am working on a project titled “Strengthening healthcare resilience to climate extremes: a spatial modelling framework.” As climate change accelerates, threats like intense flooding and heatwave-driven power cuts present risks to NHS infrastructure. My project is part of a larger collaboration with the NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), which builds spatio-temporal agent-based models to simulate how climate events disrupt the national supply of blood.

Overall Goal

My specific focus is to use Python and R to find the underlying factors driving operational costs and vulnerabilities across NHS sites when extreme weather hits. Over the next 8 weeks, I will be building two distinct predictive frameworks: Machine Learning approaches (Gradient Boosting) and Bayesian modelling to map these climate risks and handle data uncertainty.

Highlights of this week

The absolute highlight of this week was attending the ARC Festival! It was a good introduction to the Advanced Research Computing community. There was several interesting talks about the diverse research happening within ARC.

We also spent time exploring the poster presentations, where researchers shared their ongoing projects. It was a wonderful opportunity to see applications of research computing,ask questions and meet the team.

I think getting to know what everyone does and seeing how welcoming the community is made for a fantastic start to the internship.