Thanh-Khiem Nguyen: Hi! My name is Khiem, and I am a master’s student at the University of Oslo (UiO). I will begin my master’s thesis in Autumn 2025.
Currently studying pharmacy, I will be focusing this summer research project with LifeScience and PharmaSafe in the field of pharmacoepidemiology. For this project, I will investigate the association between antidepressant use and suicidal events specifically in adolescents. I will primarily use R for data preparation and analysis, and TreeScan software for detecting clusters in adverse event data.
TreeScan is a statistical tool used to detect unusual clusters of health events—such as adverse drug reactions—within hierarchical data structures like medical terminologies or disease classifications. It scans all possible groups (called “nodes”) in a predefined tree (for example, using MedDRA for adverse event terms) and identifies those with significantly higher or lower event rates than expected. This approach is especially valuable in pharmacovigilance and drug safety research, as it allows for efficient detection of potential drug-event associations while controlling for multiple comparisons across the entire hierarchy.
I am excited to expand my knowledge and look forward to collaborating with other researchers and students in the PharmaSafe group!
Petrica-Ioan Olteanu: This summer, I’m working with the Pharmasafe team at the University of Oslo to build an interactive dashboard for data-quality checks. It builds on the prototype I created last year and automatically validates data based on a multitude of checks such as variable format, completeness, plausibility and relational consistency across large Norwegian registry datasets. With a health-economics background and hands-on experience in registry-based analyses, I’m passionate about turning messy real-world data into clear, dependable insights that inform healthcare policy and supply decisions.
Nastja Bredenbrock: I am a first year master‘s student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oslo. My background in Long COVID research has encouraged me to question and improve the collection and analysis of health data. Currently, I am focussing on meta-science and open science practices. My master‘s thesis will be on the publication rate of preregistered meta-analyses in Psychology.
Mina Karkhi: Hi, my name is Mina Karkhi. I will be joining PharmaSafe as part of the Summer Research Projects for Students at UiO:Life Science. I have a B.Sc. in Radiology Technology and am currently completing an M.Phil. in International Community Health at the University of Oslo.
In my master’s thesis, I used registry data to study the association between air pollution and fracture risk in Norwegian children. Through this work, I became especially interested in the many opportunities that large-scale health data offer for public health research.
At PharmaSafe, I will work on the project “Developing Simulated Datasets for Healthcare Research in Norway”, which aims to create synthetic datasets using a range of methodologies to support healthcare research while ensuring methodological rigor and patient privacy. My work will involve data generation, validation, use case analysis, and contributing to the development of best practice guidelines for the use of synthetic health data.
I see this as a valuable opportunity to strengthen my methodological and computational skills while contributing to an important project. I'm looking forward to working alongside the PharmaSafe team and fellow students this summer.
Joanna Slavinskaitė: Hello everyone! I am Joanna, a master’s student in the European Master's in Health Economics and Management (EU-HEM) programme. I am currently specialising in economic evaluation and health technology assessment (HTA), with a particular interest in how evidence is used to support decision-making in healthcare.
So far in my studies, I have mostly worked with published Kaplan-Meier curves and aggregate data. However, I am eager to deepen my understanding of individual patient-level data and learn more about working with real-world data sources such as registries. I believe these skills are crucial to better interpret and evaluate the evidence that informs health policy and clinical decisions. One topic that especially caught my attention during my coursework was reproductive health. In one of my projects, I explored male attitudes toward male contraception, which sparked a broader interest in pregnancy and fertility-related research.
This summer, I will be working on a research project titled: " Enhancing Data Quality in Norwegian Registry Data". I feel excited and honoured to contribute to improving the quality and reliability of registry data related to pregnancy and birth outcomes. This project feels like a meaningful continuation of my interest in reproductive health, and an opportunity to build my skills in R, expand my experience with public health and epidemiological datasets—areas I’m especially keen to develop further.
I look forward to learning from researchers and fellow students and contributing to the important work being done in this field!
Thank you to UiO:Life Science for funding these summer research projects, and to all of their supervisors!