Today, we have a special guest, Shanti. Learn while she shares with us her vast experience in the pharmaceutical industry collected over 25 years. She held various positions inside and outside of statistics organization.

When I started my career as a statistician in the clinical world, I was wondering about safety analysis. I thought it's always the same - count the patients with an event - job done! Then just repeat.

But it's not that simple, especially in more complex situation where you have different follow-up times. Then the patients that stay longer on treatment as they benefit from it, also get more adverse events. Naively counting the patients with events or the number of events may make the beneficial treatment look worse. So, how can you account for this?

Why spend part of your career in non-clinical statistics?
What are the advantages?
What is the importance of having a variety of tools?

R versus SAS - which is a better tool?

Today, we talk about a controversial topic. If you go online and look into social media, you'll find a lot of data scientists that talk about R versus Python. In medical and clinical research, it's more about R versus SAS.

For this discussion, we have Sam Gardner and Thomas Neitmann representing SAS and R, respectively.

We may use movements and transformations as an add-on to the design.

However, this type of implementations can be more important than that.

Motion in visualizations is not a gratuitous element. On the contrary, animations can influence how users interact and understand our designs.

We all want to be happy and satisfied at work and get some recognition. Yet, work is often a struggle, a troll.

What can we do to be happier at work?
How to work in a dynamic environment?
What are the different supervisory skills you can use to be happier at work?

Invictus
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

How can you determine what control strategy to use for a manufacturing process?
What can you learn from this even if you are not working with manufacturing?

A control strategy for a drug manufacturing process is the overall approach to ensure that when you make the drug product, it’s going to be of acceptable quality. It is a great way to think about how you can optimize and control a very long process that has many factors.

The topics we discuss apply a lot for any other process that you are looking into where there many steps and where understand variability and what is driving quality is important.

In this episode, you will also learn about the design of factorial experiments.

Never Split the Difference written by Chris Voss, who was a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home. He reveals the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. 

Today, the number of infected people in this pandemic has been increasing and the third wave is coming, but statisticians still cannot convince the government to act accordingly. They fail in negotiating their point and convincing others. This book gives us some tips and tricks, and some calibrating questions on how to make effective negotiation that lead us to a YES.

What are the 5 levels of statistician leadership?
How you can develop your leadership skills over time?

Leadership is multidimensional. It depends on lots of different skills like communication, being a good team player, building trust and relationship, negotiating conflicts, and more. The kind of leadership that I am talking about is not supervising other people or the administrative type of leadership, but it's a type of cross functional influencing where you lead others that don't necessarily report to you.

In this episode, we talk about non-clinical research and development and how statisticians contribute to these efforts. Join us while we talk about the following important phases of R&D.