

The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI
Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske, biometricians, statisticians and leaders in the pharma industry
The podcast from statisticians for statisticians to have a bigger impact at work. This podcast is set up in association with PSI - Promoting Statistical Insight. This podcast helps you to grow your leadership skills, learn about ongoing discussions in the scientific community, build you knowledge about the health sector and be more efficient at work. This podcast helps statisticians at all levels with and without management experience. It is targeted towards the health, but lots of topics will be important for the wider data scientists community.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 25, 2019 • 39min
What is the best career option for me?
Interview with Oliver Schoenborn-Kellenberger
Click here to get to the homepage of the episode!
Do you want to change your job?
Are you just looking for you first job?
Do you consider to work for your own company or as a free-lancer?
Then this episode will help you!

Mar 18, 2019 • 55min
Introduction to Benefit-Risk Assessment
Interview with Maria Costa and Shahrul Mt-Isa
Click here to access the homepage of the episode!
Benefit-risk assessments are made by various stakeholders including sponsors, regulators, payers, physicians, and patients throughout the life-cycle of a treatment.
The understanding of data plays a vital role in weighting positive and negative effects of medications.
In this episode, we give you an introduction to what benefit-risk (BR) assessment is in order for you to understand your role.

Mar 11, 2019 • 45min
How to get most out of a conference
Interview with Kate Taylor – chair of the PSI conference in 2019
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In this episode, we talk about
how to network
how to prepare for the conference
how to
follow up after the conference
As well as some specific topics around the PSI conference itself.

Mar 4, 2019 • 46min
Introduction to cluster analysis
Not all patients are created equal, but are there subgroups that are more homogenous?
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This episode follows the outline of a webinar, that I presented in 2018 during a PSI webinar. I’m introducing cluster analysis and why you as a statistician need to know about it.

Feb 25, 2019 • 60min
Data science or just statistics on non-medical data? A new horizon for statisticians
Interview with Stephen Ruberg
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There’s a long tradition of statisticians working on clinical studies as well as other related data, e.g. pre-clinical data and observational data. In the advent of big data and data sciences, there’s a considerable pull from the business side of pharma to employ statistical approaches as well.
What does this mean for medical statisticians?

Feb 18, 2019 • 46min
Current trends in data science for pharma – findings from a qualitative survey and what we should do about it!
Interview with Ursula Garczarek
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Do you want to learn where the health sector might be heading in terms of data science?
Do you understand the opportunities and barriers in terms of the application of data science?
Are you prepared to learn the individual skills needed for these changes?
Then this interview with Ursula from Cytel provides you with the relevant answers.

Feb 11, 2019 • 26min
What you can learn about communication of statistics from a statistician working for the BBC
Interview with Robert Cuffe
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It's surely not the norm, that a statistician from the pharma sector ends up working for BBC. But Robert Cuffe has taken this step and needs to explain statistics to non-statisticians on a daily basis.
In this episode, he shares the different methods he’s using. We also dive into common pitfalls, that we as statisticians trap into.
Finally, we also learn, how we can improve our publications to make sure, that the science is reported correctly in the broader news

Feb 4, 2019 • 31min
What is TransCelerate and how it will impact your work tremendously
Interview with Pepa Polavieja
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Do you know that TransCelerate does for statisticians?
Do you write study protocols, analysis plans and programming specifications as individual documents noting, that there’s lots of redundancy?
Do you wonder, if there’s a more efficient was in-line with what regulators want?
Pepa Polavieja will provide you with answers to all these questions in this episode.

Jan 28, 2019 • 50min
The rise of R and what role the AIMS SIG plays in it
Interview with Lyn Tailor and Craig McIlloney
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Do you think, R can’t be used for regulatory submissions?
Are you forced to use SAS but would like to use R instead?
Would you like to understand how you can make R submission proof?
Then this interview with Lyn Tailor and Craig McIlloney helps you.
Both work on the PSI special interest group Application and Implementation of Methodologies in Statistics (AIMS) on this topics.

Jan 22, 2019 • 51min
Practical steps to improve your leadership skills
Interview with Gary Sullivan
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In this last part of the leadership series with Gary Sullivan, we talk about the next steps, you can take to work on your leadership skills.