Data Science Team Training

Second edition

Preface

Public health teams produce recurring analyses, reports, and dashboards, often with limited staff and time. This book covers practices that make that work easier to repeat, review, and share: version control, organized data, documented code, reproducible reports, and clear team responsibilities.

This book grew out of the CSTE Data Science Team Training (DSTT) program, where I serve as a project coach working with public health agencies across the country to build data science capacity in the public health workforce. The material here includes code, resources, workshop notes, and practical guidance accumulated and refined over several years of coaching teams at local and state health departments.

The technical chapters cover the organization, verification, and delivery of analytical work. The nontechnical chapters cover staffing, onboarding, project planning, data governance, review, and communication.

The testing, debugging, and API chapters (4  Testing Analysis Code, 5  Debugging and Getting Help, 18  APIs and Public Data Sources) include worked examples with the code and explanations together. The targets section (Multi-Step Pipelines with targets) includes every file needed to build and run a small reporting pipeline.

While this material was created with DSTT participants in mind, it is intended to be broadly useful to anyone working at the intersection of data science and public health, whether you are a current or former DSTT participant, a public health practitioner looking to strengthen your analytical skills, or someone new to data science in a public health context.

Appendix A — Additional Resources lists further reading and training. Appendix B — Spending a Training Budget covers choosing paid training and meeting procurement deadlines.

Cite this book:

Turner, Stephen D. (2026). Data Science Team Training, 2nd ed. Retrieved from https://dstt.stephenturner.us/.

@book{turner2026dstt,
  title   = {Data Science Team Training},
  author  = {Turner, Stephen D.},
  date    = {2026},
  edition = {2},
  url     = {https://dstt.stephenturner.us/}
}

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.