CSCAR and MIDAS will hold a series of on-line technical workshops on the use of publicly-available data for analyzing human health at the population level. Some of the analyses and data are relevant to understanding the covid pandemic, but the focus of these workshops is on methods that are of broader use in population health research. Participants will gain practical skills in using intermediate methods from statistics and data science to gain meaningful insights from various types of data. Python code and links to all relevant data will be provided for each workshop. The first workshop in this series will be held on May 18th from 3-5pm, and will cover the use of generalized linear modeling and generalized PCA to gain insight into mortality trends among various demographic subgroups in the United States, using data from the CDC.