IPDLN

In July 2026, the MDI team presented at the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN) conference in Rotterdam.  IPDLN brings together researchers and data stewards from around the world who work on the technical and ethical challenges of linkage population-level datasets.  Amy O’Hara presented at two sessions about trusted research environments and the use and misuse of evidence.  Jake Pasner presented his data governance transformation model and cohosted a workshop about data governance policy frameworks. Ella Blue networked with attendees and drove interest in the upcoming Administrative Data Research Conference (ADRCon) in July 2027 at McCourt.

A recurring theme at IPDLN 2026 was improving secure data access.  That connects directly to work MDI is doing here at Georgetown, particularly involving privacy enhancing technologies.

Conferences like IPDLN are a valuable change to MDI to learn from and contribute to a global community grappling with the same questions we work on daily: how to make data more accessible without compromising privacy, how to assess and develop policies that balance the risk-utility tradeoff, and considering the ethical and social implications of using data at scale.  We look forward to building on these conversations with researchers from across the US and North America at ADRCon 2027.