Chuck Kincaid, practice manager for the Experis Business Analytics Practice, discusses how to navigate today’s job market.
Master's Notebook
Master’s in Statistics Proves Valuable in Workplace
Lauren Bailey, a first-year biostatistics PhD student at the University of Illinois in Chicago, shares how she discovered the value statistics plays in the workplace.
Getting Graphic with Biostatistics
Susan Duke, manager of benefit risk evaluation at GlaxoSmithKline, talks about her journey into statistical graphics.
On Being a Fresh Grad
It has been nine months since Andrea Barbo presented, with her classmates, in a poster session as the culmination of a year’s work for their master’s in biostatistics. Here, Barbo and her classmates share their experiences as fresh graduate students and discuss their first jobs post-master’s.
Statistics in Science
Shari Messinger discusses the role of a collaborating statistician.
Mining the Science Out of Marketing
Jim Fong discusses his evolution from statistician/analyst to marketing consultant and what role statistics plays in market research.
Clinical Trials and Academia: Goodness of Fit
Gloria Broadwater explains her role as a statistician at Duke Cancer Institute’s Cancer Statistical Center.
Going East
China, which is the world’s third-largest pharmaceutical market after the United States and Japan, grew faster than expected. Drug sales are predicted to increase 25%–27% to more than $50 billion next year, overtaking Japan’s by 2015. Here, Coco Fan and Ping Zhan show how statisticians are needed from the West to transform China’s pharmaceutical industry.
Software Testing: A Rewarding Career
The goal of a statistical software tester is to verify that the software functions correctly and produces valid results. The mantra of a successful tester is (to paraphrase President Ronald Reagan), “Don’t trust and verify!” Testers build suites of test programs and benchmark the results, including graphical displays. A SAS test suite has thousands of procedure calls to validate numeric results, verify functionality of statements and options, and check for proper error handling. These suites are run frequently during the development cycle and any benchmark changes are investigated. A thorough test suite detects unexpected side effects of updates to the code.
The Statistician’s Role in an Integrated Health Care System
The need to improve the effectiveness of clinical care delivery is greater than ever. Here, Intermountain Healthcare clinicians Karen Valentine, Roberta James, and Cempaka Martial discuss a statistician’s role in an integrated health care system.