Federated resources and analytics for child health research
Webinar Title: Federated resources and analytics for child health research
Dr. Demetris Avraam
Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract: Child health research increasingly relies on large-scale, multi-country cohort data to understand the complex interplay of biological, environmental, and social determinants of health. In Europe, the EU Child Cohort Network (ECCN) alogside the DataSHIELD federated analytics infrastructure, brings together longitudinal birth and child cohorts from multiple countries, creating an unprecedented resource for life-course research while respecting ethical, legal, and governance constraints.
This talk introduces the ECCN and its online catalogue, which provides harmonised metadata and cohort profiles to support study discovery and feasibility assessment, and demonstrates how these resources are combined with the DataSHIELD platform to enable secure cross-cohort analyses without centralising individual-level data. Through applied use-cases, including analyses of socioeconomic inequalities, environmental exposures, and early-life determinants of health outcomes, we show how DataSHIELD allows researchers to run statistical models across distributed ECCN cohorts by returning only non-disclosive summary results, ensuring GDPR compliance. These examples illustrate how federated analytics overcomes data-sharing barriers, increases statistical power, and accelerates reproducible, collaborative child health research in Europe and beyond.
