Stats + Stories

Kelly McConville is a survey statistician who develops estimation techniques that combine complex survey data with big data sources. Her work is used to estimate official statistics, related to canopy cover or occupational statistics, or to assess the impact of voter ID laws. She enjoys teaching her students how to learn from data and introducing them to R (an open source statistical software program). She also involves her students in her work and co-chairs two national programs: the Undergraduate Statistics Project Competition and the Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference

Making the Census Count | Stats + Stories Episode 106 by The Stats + Stories Team

Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University. He is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. He received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics, is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and has been elected to receive the Karl Pearson Prize of ISI this summer.

Dr. Scott Evans is a tenured Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Director of the George Washington Biostatistics Center. He is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and three textbooks on clinical trials including Fundamentals for New Clinical Trialists. His other positions include the Director of the Statistical and Data Management Center (SDMC) for the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG), a collaborative clinical research network that prioritizes, designs, and executes clinical research to reduce the public health threat of antibacterial resistance as well as the Editor-in-Chief of CHANCE and Statistical Communications in Infectious Diseases (SCID) magazines.

Nicole Lazar is Professor of Statistics at the University of Georgia. After receiving her BA in Statistics and Psychology from Tel Aviv University, she served three years as Statistics Officer in the Israel Defense Forces Department of Behavioral Sciences. She then moved to the US for graduate school, obtaining her MS in Statistics from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Statistics from The University of Chicago. She was Associate Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the Department of Statistics, University of Georgia.

Tommy Wright, statistician in the US Census Center for Statistical Research and Methodology, joined the Stats+Stories regulars (original host Bob Long) to discuss what the US Census Bureau does and why it is important. (The Census data visualization library is a treat and should be explored by anyone with an interest in viewing characteristics of the US.)

Dr. Scott Evans is a tenured Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Director of the George Washington Biostatistics Center. He is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and three textbooks on clinical trials including Fundamentals for New Clinical Trialists. His other positions include the Director of the Statistical and Data Management Center (SDMC) for the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG), a collaborative clinical research network that prioritizes, designs, and executes clinical research to reduce the public health threat of antibacterial resistance as well as the Editor-in-Chief of CHANCE and Statistical Communications in Infectious Diseases (SCID) magazines.

Karen Bandeen-Roche, PhD is a statistician / gerontologist who currently chairs the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her statistical specialty areas of research are in latent variable and multivariate outcome modeling. Her gerontologic research aims to better understand the causes and course of physical disability, cognitive decline, and frailty in older adults, so that their adverse implications can be delayed or avoided. She is an ASA Fellow and a Marvin Zelen Leadership in Statistical Science Award winner, and she has contributed extensive service to promote the statistical profession through leadership in scientific review panels and our professional societies.

We have reached episode 100 of Stats + Stories and therefore we felt like it would be a good time to have John Bailer, Richard Campbell and Rosemary Pennington sit around and talk about what all has brought us here and what more to expect in the future.

Dr. Caitlin Kontgis is a technical lead on the Applied Science team at Descartes Labs and was honored at the New Mexico Tech Council’s Women in Tech celebration in March 2018. Prior to moving to New Mexico in early 2016 to join the Descartes Labs team, she earned her PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where her research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation to study land cover change and climate change effects on the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam. Since moving to Santa Fe, Caitlin began volunteering at the local Girls Inc chapter and joined the board in fall of 2017. She is passionate about supporting women in STEM fields and scientific literacy. When not at work, you can find Caitlin running, skiing, and hiking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.