This page provides an overview of conducting a research project at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign Digital Health Group. It is especially targeted at student research projects but is generally applicable to other larger research projects at the Biodesign Digital Health group.

<aside> 📚 You might get overwhelmed when reading through this document for the first time. Feel free to reach out to Paul Schmiedmayer if you have any questions. We will continuously update the page to clarify sections.

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Tools

We use multiple tools to keep track of your progress. We do mostly use tools that are openly available and are typically used in research and software development.

• Notion
  • *"What is Notion?":* We will use Notion to keep track of your progress, create meeting pages, status updates and persist important information. It is the core infrastructure for most of the day-to-day work in the research project.
  • Once you have started to prepare for your research project, you will get your own Notion sub-page to organize your tasks and meeting pages.
• Github
  • "What is GitHub?": We use GitHub to host your source code, proposal template and papers, and keep track of any development issues. It is the core infrastructure for any software development and community work during your research project.
  • We believe that open-source is essential to advance science and democratize access to knowledge. We use the Stanford BDHG and Stanford Spezi to host all the source code and project that you will be working on.
• Slack
  • "What is Slack?": We use the Stanford Slack grid as your main communication tool. Once you have started to work on your research project and made some first steps, we will incite you to our Slack workspace.
  • While Slack is a great way for quick communication, any development-related issues and elements related to software develop that could be discussed in the open should be discussed in our open-source projects using GitHub issues, discussions, and code contributions.
• LaTex: Overleaf, Texifier or your favorite text editor
  • "What is LaTex?": LaTex is a great way to typeset and format your scientific documents. It is like coding but for text writing and formatting. Using LaTex you can focus on your text and it manages your references, figure links, mathematical equations, and other elements for you. We highly recommend the LaTex in 30 minutes tutorial to get familiar with LaTex.
  • We recommend using the git and GitHub integration in Overleaf or Texifier as a great offline LaTex editor.
  • BibDesk is a great tool to manage your references. Stanford also offers great online reference manages that you can use.
• Stanford One Drive
  • "What is Stanford One Drive?": We use One Drive to store and sync larger data like PDFs and other sources that we need to share. Ensure that you provide read and write access to any collaborators. If you do not have a Stanford account, we can provide you a shared folder once you reach the step in the research timeline.

Conceptualization

During this phase we are moving from a general idea and area of interest to a more structured project with actionable goals, a great learning experience, and a clear impactful outcome.

<aside> 🗓️ This timeline is targeted to Stanford students. If you are a non-Stanford student interested in conducting research at Stanford please be aware that the process of potentially onboarding you might take significantly longer and more elaborate.

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Depending on the complexity and research depth you want to work on the topic, brainstorming & the proposal can be a bit faster or take longer. Implementation-focused projects often require shorter brainstorming and proposal times than more extensive research involvements to write a research paper.

Topic Brainstorming (~ 2 months before the project starts)

The first step is to identify your research project. We have a dedicated page for this process.

How to Choose Your Research Project

<aside> 💡 We are a healthcare software engineering-focused group. Please check out the linked guide on how you can stand out and demonstrate your fit before setting up a first meeting.

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Proposal (~ 1 months before the project starts)

We have created a LaTex https://github.com/StanfordBDHG/ProposalTemplate to guide you through the process of defining the scope of the research, the system you want to develop, and structure your learning experience. Once we agree on a topic, we will provide you a fork of the https://github.com/StanfordBDHG/ProposalTemplate repository that you can use to work on your proposal and continuously share the proposal with us.