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San Francisco Bay Area Chapter Celebrates 90th Birthday, Hosts Career Development Panel

1 March 2019 1,439 views No Comment

90th birthday cake

The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (SFASA) celebrated its 90th anniversary and presented a career development discussion panel December 8, 2018, at the Seven Hills Conference Center of San Francisco State University (SFSU). More than 200 chapter members attended.

Kathy Zhang of BeiGene, who is the past president of SFASA, made opening remarks.

Two eminent keynote speakers, Bradley Efron of Stanford University and Michael Jordan of the University of California, Berkeley, gave talks in the afternoon. The title of Efron’s keynote was “Easy-to-Use Programs for Bootstrap Confidence Intervals.” Jordan’s keynote presentation was titled “Machine Learning: Dynamics, Economics, and Stochastics.”

From left: Alex Tsui, Shengle Lin, Alan Paciorek, Xiaoli Qi, Michael Wulfsohn, Doris Shu, Tao He, Chris Barker, Li Zhang, Kathy Zhang, Dean Fearn, Donna Spiker, Ron Yu, Bradley Efron, Alan Hopkins, Jing Du, Ling Shen, Jing Huang, and Ruixiao Lu

Between the keynote speeches, several past and current chapter officers shared their experiences volunteering for the local chapter with the audience. Li Zhang of the University of California, San Francisco, who is the current chapter president, reviewed the history and recent activities of SFASA.

Ruixiao Lu of Genomic Health, who was the chapter president in 2014–2015 and currently serves as vice chair of District 6 on the ASA Council of Chapters Governing Board, gave an informative talk on the many ways in which the ASA is able to help its local chapters.

Chris Barker of Statistical Planning and Analysis Services presented the AP Statistics program, a volunteer initiative he initiated and has been organizing since he was chapter president in 2011–2012. Through this program, statisticians from the chapter volunteer their time and give one-hour lectures about careers in statistics to AP Statistics students at local high schools.

From left: Ling Shen, Kathy Zhang, Li Zhang, Jing Du, Michael Jordan, Tao He, Ron Yu, and Xiaoli Qi

Jing Huang of Veracyte, who was the chapter president in 2015–2016, is the founding president of DahShu and Council of Chapters representative for SFASA. She reviewed the close collaboration between the two organizations.

Other speakers included Serkan Hosten of SFSU, who welcomed everyone to the campus, and Jonathan Levy, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and first-place winner of the 2018 SFASA student travel award for JSM. He shared his story of going back to school after being a professional musician for more than 10 years and remarked about the impact of receiving the travel award.

Before the coffee break, a large custom cake with the written message “SFASA 90th Anniversary Celebration” was cut by Efron and Hosten, marking a celebratory moment.

After the dinner, we continued with our new annual tradition of hosting a career development panel discussion for statisticians and data scientists. The eight distinguished panelists from both academia and industry were the following:

  • Chetan Gadgil, Global Director: Intel IoT RfP Ready Kits, Intel
  • Alan Hopkins, Global Vice President of Biometrics, BeiGene
  • Alan Hubbard, Professor and Division Head of Biostatistics, University of California, Berkeley
  • Qi Jiang, Vice President and Head of Biometrics, Seattle Genetics
  • Mohammad R. Kafai, Professor and Director of Statistics, San Francisco State University
  • Mi-Ok Kim, Professor of Biostatistics and Director of Biostatistics at UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco
  • Fei Long, Director of Data Science, Dropbox
  • Michael Wulfsohn, Senior Vice President of Biometrics, Gilead Sciences

The panel discussion, which was facilitated by Tao He of SFSU and Ron Yu of Gilead Sciences—who are the SFASA vice president and president-elect, respectively—began with a self-introduction from each panelist. The panelists recounted how they entered the field of statistics and described their career paths. After that, the floor opened for questions.

For more than one and a half hours, the audience sought advice and insight from the panelists on topics such as applying for graduate studies; learning statistics on one’s own; a statistician/data scientist’s job in academia, pharma/biotech, and high-tech industries; success stories of real-world data; communication and decision-making in the workplace; social responsibilities of statisticians and data scientists; and the time ahead for automated machine learning. Panelists addressed those concerns and questions with patience and warmth, and the audience responded enthusiastically.

Based on a follow-up survey, more than 90% of the respondents rated this event above average and would recommend it to their colleagues and friends.

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