This is Hema Sekhar Reddy Rajula, PhD student at the UNICA (University of Cagliari, Italy). For my secondment, I worked on CAPICE data catalog at Janssen-Cilag AB (Stockholm) for the duration of three months from March to May 2018. 

I was extremely happy and honored when I was in Sweden for my secondment at Janssen within the CAPICE project. I see this as an great career opportunity to work in the industrial environment. I have been working on CAPICE data catalog and I learned so much from supervisors and colleagues. I met Marica Leone and Ashley Thompson, who are the ESRs in the CAPICE project in Janssen-Cilag AB and Karolinska Institutet respectively.

My supervisors are David Myers and Michel Van Speybroeck. David Myers is an Associate Director Market Access RWE Partnerships at Janssen Cilag AB, Stockholm, Sweden. Michel Van Speybroeck is a Data Scientist at Janssen from Beerse, Belgium.

There are 16 cohorts available for CAPICE data catalog. ALSPAC is one of the cohorts from University of Bristol. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a transgenerational prospective observational study investigating influences on health and development across the life course. It considers multiple genetic, epigenetic, biological, psychological, social and other environmental exposures in relation to a similarly diverse range of health, social and developmental outcomes. Based at the University of Bristol, the ALSPAC is a world-leading birth cohort study. Between April 1991 and December 1992 more than 14,000 pregnant women were recruited into the study and these women (some of whom had two pregnancies or multiple births during the recruitment period), the children arising from the pregnancy, and their partners have been followed up intensively over two decades.

Currently we are working on ALSPAC data and trying to pull the list of variable names from the ALSPAC variable catalogue. To perform the multi-site analyses most efficiently, the aim is to build a facility that allows analyzing all data available over sites without necessarily having access to the raw data.

Mental health symptoms were measured with questionnaires. These questionnaires are known for their association with clinical diagnoses and are therefore widely used in clinical practice. The advantage of this dimensional approach is that it captures more of the variation present in the general population than a dichotomous measure that only indicates the presence or absence of a diagnosis. Many cohorts use the same or similar questionnaires, which makes it possible to harmonize the data over cohorts and come to one common phenotype.

Secondment at Janssen provides me more confidence for my personal and professional career. I have great expectations in the following years.