The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI

Interview with Kat Greenbrook Storytelling allows businesses to better understand insight. Data visualization is a great tool to help share, or tell a story, but relies on the story being written first. Improved data communication comes from combining good visualization with a well-written narrative. At storytelling with data, the goal is to rid the world of ineffective graphs and help people elegantly communicate with data. They aim to bring data to life and use it to tell a story to an audience, with a focus on simplicity and ease of interpretation. They believe everyone can inspire positive change through the stories they tell with data. There's a lot to learn to be a good data storyteller. Today, I’m talking with Kat about: What do you understand by storytelling with data?Why is it important?Which role should statisticians play?What skills do statisticians need for this?Where to learn these skills?

Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! There is an endless list of things that can go wrong.I'm pretty sure you have been in painful discussions about this.Have you felt a lot of frustrations on both ends? Benjamin works for the CRO and I work for the sponsor side. In this episode, we will be giving you a lot of insights on what to do and what not to do, and how to make collaboration between the sponsor and CRO successful. Specifically, Benjamin and I will be talking about: Have partnership on an equal levelCreate common expectations on qualityEstablish stable personal relationshipsHave low turn over ratesTransparency of processes is importantHave a fair paymentInvest in creating trustGood feedback habits Work towards CRO processes and SOPs Choose your vendor wisely - a good choice is half the success

“Data Driven Decision Making in Medical Research” Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! In this series of interviews with the speakers at the conference, we talked about different topics: Visualization softwareBenefit risks approachGlobal statistical test for multiple endpoint analysisEstimandsAE analysis using a volcano plot I also talked to Rachel Phillips at the PSI conference. She is an NIHR doctoral research fellow at Imperial College London. Please help her with her study. It will help all of us in the end and you can win something! This is a survey of clinical trial statisticians with experience of planning and performing final data analyses for pharmacological RCTs to explore their awareness of available statistical methods to flag adverse events as potential adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and identify any potential barriers to their use, as well as gain feedback on ideas for new statistical methods. They would like participants to provide their personal views. This study is being organised and sponsored by Imperial College London. This study is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The survey should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete and all participants will be entered into a prize draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher. The survey should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete and all participants will be entered into a prize draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher. If you are happy to participate in the survey, please follow the link below: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/R5M2R83 Listen to this episode, to get more insights into what’s possible and to learn more about the conference!

Discussion between Benjamin and Alexander Do you agree that everybody makes mistakes?Have you had to deal with a mistake yourself, that you were really concerned about?Were you afraid about speaking with your supervisor or your team with it? We are all imperfect humans making mistakes. The questions are: how do we deal with them, what we can do about them, and what to do to minimize them. Processes are made to minimize mistakes and there different processes were set up to deal with mistakes and help you when mistakes occur.

Interview with Julia Carter Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! Have you been sitting in boring presentations that made you start reading your emails? Have you been listening to someone, wondering if this is for me?Have you been getting away from a presentation and thinking 2 hours later: “what was this about?” You’re surely don’t want your audience to feel this way, when you’re presenting yourself. You can’t be an effective statisticians without good presentation skills from my perspective. You will always need to present results, defend designs, or explain data. Todays episode will give you insights into 7 mistakes of presentations. And honestly, I see at least one of them in nearly every presentation and I struggle with them as well – just listen to this episode and you’ll have a live example 😊.

Let's write an abstract together Join the abstract writing challenge here! The last PSI conference has just ended, but the timeline for a new abstract submission for the next one in Barcelone in 2020 will come up in about November 2019. Thus, it’s important to now start thinking about it. Presenting at the PSI conference is an awesome experience. For me, PSI is by far the best conference for statisticians in the health sector as it is 100% applicable and actionable. If you’re abstract gets accepted for oral presentation or as a poster, you have a great argument for convincing your supervisor to approve the travel to Barcelona. If you think, this is to much of a stretch, because you’re not located in Europe, just think about a different conference. Join the challenge to submit an abstract and work together with others to overcome and roadblocks!

Interview with Jack Corbett Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! I recently changed my job and moving from one company to another comes with lots of uncertainty. Will I pick the right one? How can I make sure, that I actually get the job, that I want? Will hiring companies find me and offer me jobs? For any statistician a job change represent a major shift and occurs rather infrequent – hopefully. For a recruiter – this is day-to-day business. Look out for lots of great learnings and insights!

A success story with Katie and Claire Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! Have you ever considered to work with a placement student? Do you consider to spend some time as a placement student yourself? In this interview with Katie Thorn and Claire Brittain, we’re exploring factors, which help to make it a win for both sides. Both have worked very well together and share their stories.

to make the best of your time Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! I recently talked to a statistician, that initiated a small company internal group of statisticians to drive forward methodological innovation projects. While this surely will help the individuals to learn more about statistical methods, it was less clear, why and on which topics the group should focus their activities on. While most of our day-to-day activities consists of running clinical studies, submissions and directly related work, we also engage in such innovation work streams or process improvement working groups and other such activities. Today, we’re giving you advice on how to best pick the right projects to work on as you usually have some influence on this.

Interview with Marco Boeri Click here to get to the homepage of the episode! As statisticians in the medical field, we’re used to study subgroups of patients with respect to all kinds of biological variables: from demographics to genomics. This provides us with a good understanding of how the benefit-risk profile for a given patient looks like. However, the patient might have a completely different view on the importance of the different benefits and risks. And importantly, these preferences might be less driven by biologic factors and more by personal experiences and situations as well as psychological traits. How can we assess patient preferences in this regard? Marco Boeri and I worked on such questions in the past and some work has been presented at last years PSI conference. In todays episode, we give you some insights into what’s possible and how you can approach this problem.