Rick Peterson, ASA Professional Development & Chapters and Sections Manager

Professional Development (PD) is a fundamental component of the professional life of statisticians, and it increases the value of their contributions to society. PD is the process of improving and broadening the knowledge, skill, and personal qualities needed to be successful in the practice of statistics. The Professional Development Program at JSM boasts 30 continuing education courses, 12 computer technology workshops, and four personal skills development offerings.

The continuing education courses cover a breadth of topics such as Bayesian methods, clinical trials, data mining, longitudinal and continuous data, and survey methods. New courses this year include a primer to web scraping, a hands-on introduction to Rcpp, and statistical analysis of network data. Courses are offered in two-day, one-day, and half-day formats during the Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of JSM. This year’s two-day course is “Introduction to Bayesian Methods, Computation, and Modeling,” to be presented by Joseph Ibrahim. Other distinguished faculty members include Garrett Fitzmaurice, Wayne Fuller, Christy Chuang-Stein, Richard De Veaux, Alan Agresti, and Donald Rubin.

Computer technology workshops are overviews of software applications on a variety of methodologies such as data mining, small-area estimation, and clinical trials. Featured software providers this year are Cytel, Salford Systems, SAS, and Stata. The workshops are an hour and forty-five minutes in length and are on the Wednesday of JSM.

It is important for statisticians to be proficient in “soft skills” to collaborate with internal colleagues and decision makers and external clients. To complement the traditional courses in the PD program, he ASA now offers personal skills development workshops and panel discussions. Featured this year are three full-day workshops: Effective Collaboration, Preparing Statisticians for Leadership: How to See the Big Picture and Have More Influence, and Effective Presentations for Statisticians: Success = (PD)2. Additionally, there is a two-hour panel on Sunday that is free to all JSM attendees: Career Development: Power Careers in Statistics.

Register for any of the above when you register for JSM. If you have already registered for JSM, you can go back and add them on. If you have any question about the Professional Development Program, email Rick Peterson at rick@amstat.org.