The 2019 PSI Conference took place at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre (QEII), London, with the theme of “Data Driven Decision Making in Medical Research”.

The sessions included early phase innovative trial design, industry best practice, statistical issues in safety drug labelling, model-based dose-finding designs, an update from Transcelerate and much more.

In this series of interviews with the speakers at the conference, we talked about different topics:
- Visualization software
- Benefit risks approach
- Global statistical test for multiple endpoint analysis
- Estimands
- AE analysis using a volcano plot

Do you agree that everybody makes mistakes?
Have you had to deal with a mistake yourself, that you were really concerned about?
Were you afraid about speaking with your supervisor or your team with it?

We are all imperfect humans making mistakes. The questions are:

how do we deal with them,
what we can do about them, and
what to do to minimize them.

Processes are made to minimize mistakes and there different processes were set up to deal with mistakes and help you when mistakes occur.

Have you been sitting in boring presentations that made you start reading your emails?
Have you been listening to someone, wondering if this is for me?
Have you been getting away from a presentation and thinking 2 hours later: “what was this about?”

You’re surely don’t want your audience to feel this way, when you’re presenting yourself. You can’t be an effective statisticians without good presentation skills from my perspective. You will always need to present results, defend designs, or explain data.

Todays episode will give you insights into 7 mistakes of presentations. And honestly, I see at least one of them in nearly every presentation and I struggle with them as well – just listen to this episode and you’ll have a live example 😊.

The last PSI conference has just ended, but the timeline for a new abstract submission for the next one in Barcelone in 2020 will come up in about November 2019. Thus, it’s important to now start thinking about it.

Presenting at the PSI conference is an awesome experience. For me, PSI is by far the best conference for statisticians in the health sector as it is 100% applicable and actionable. If you’re abstract gets accepted for oral presentation or as a poster, you have a great argument for convincing your supervisor to approve the travel to Barcelona.

If you think, this is to much of a stretch, because you’re not located in Europe, just think about a different conference.

Join the challenge to submit an abstract and work together with others to overcome and roadblocks!

I recently changed my job and moving from one company to another comes with lots of uncertainty.
Will I pick the right one?
How can I make sure, that I actually get the job, that I want?
Will hiring companies find me and offer me jobs?

For any statistician a job change represent a major shift and occurs rather infrequent – hopefully. For a recruiter – this is day-to-day business.

Look out for lots of great learnings and insights!

Have you ever considered to work with a placement student?
Do you consider to spend some time as a placement student yourself?

In this interview with Katie Thorn and Claire Brittain, we’re exploring factors, which help to make it a win for both sides. Both have worked very well together and share their stories.

I recently talked to a statistician, that initiated a small company internal group of statisticians to drive forward methodological innovation projects. While this surely will help the individuals to learn more about statistical methods, it was less clear, why and on which topics the group should focus their activities on.

While most of our day-to-day activities consists of running clinical studies, submissions and directly related work, we also engage in such innovation work streams or process improvement working groups and other such activities.

Today, we’re giving you advice on how to best pick the right projects to work on as you usually have some influence on this.

As statisticians in the medical field, we’re used to study subgroups of patients with respect to all kinds of biological variables: from demographics to genomics. This provides us with a good understanding of how the benefit-risk profile for a given patient looks like.

However, the patient might have a completely different view on the importance of the different benefits and risks. And importantly, these preferences might be less driven by biologic factors and more by personal experiences and situations as well as psychological traits. How can we assess patient preferences in this regard?

Marco Boeri and I worked on such questions in the past and some work has been presented at last years PSI conference. In todays episode, we give you some insights into what’s possible and how you can approach this problem.

Estimands continue to be a hot topic, but many statisticians struggle to put it into practice. As statistician, we wonder about the correct interpretation and how to analyse different estimands.

In todays episode, we speak with Michael O’Kelly, an expert on this topic with lots of presentations around estimand (see e.g. the PSI events). He also won the award for Statistical Excellence in the Pharmaceutical Industry, jointly run by the RSS and Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI).

One of the most common questions I got asked during my nearly 2 decades of being a statistician sounds similar to this: “Which patients have the best response to treatment?”
I’m sure, we all face this situation sooner or later and not surprisingly lots of research has happened in the last years on this area. In todays episode, we will help you to understand one of the best approaches I have come across to solve this problem in a rigorous yet sophisticated way: the SIDES approach.
Both Andy Nicholls and I have applied this approach in the past and we’ll use an example, which he presented during a PSI webinar.
Listen to this episode to learn step by step how to apply the SIDES method.