If we think of world experts, we often think of people, that are candidates for the Nobel prize. We tend to have the believe, that we will never be able to achieve such a status. Actually most of us probably don’t even think about getting to this level.

This is why we are so happy to have Claire Brittain as our guest on the show. In an ordinary role of a statistician working in early phase, she has done outstanding work.

Listen to her story of how she came to be called a world expert on Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative disease.

This amazing story has lots of learnings for each of us.

Finally, Claire will present a poster about her work at the PSI conference in Amsterdam. Actually, it’s not just a poster, but listen to the episode and you’ll learn what’s so special there.

In todays episode, we take a look into the future - the future of PSI and how it will impact you. Both candidates, that run for becoming chair of PSI - Lucy Rowell and Naomi Givens - speak about their vision in our interview today.

Of course, this episode will help you to decide who to vote for, but it will also help you to understand how to benefit from PSI by becoming an active member. Both candidates share their stories of how they got more and more involved within PSI and how they were able to impact the world of statistics through PSI.

In more detail, we’ll cover the following topics in the episode:

Experience of the candidates with PSI
Achievement at PSI and their current role on the board of directors for PSI
Why do they want to become chair of PSI
Changes to PSI, that the candidates would like to initiate
The candidates visions for the future for PSI and how to get there

Do you have a lot of email ping-pong, where emails go back and forth many times – too many times?

Are you aware about the brand of you, that you communicate with your email style?

Is email your default communication tool?

Then this episode is for you. We have researched various articles on good email writing copies and distilled the best for you in this episode.

By listening to this episode, you will learn about:

When is email the best way to communicate?
Approaches to attachments.
How to take care of your style?
How to structure your emails?
About different email cultures
Simple actionable tricks to improve your effectiveness directly

Everybody uses email multiple times during the day and email represents a key communication channel. Managing the flood of emails effectively, will reduce your stress.

In this episode, we discuss various approaches, that we learned over the years from different productivity experts. We discuss how we implement them in our daily routines.

By listening to this episode, you’ll learn about these topics:

What are helpful mindsets about emails
Five step approach to managing emails
Good habits to establish like
Reply in a timely manner
Send and respond less to receive less.
Tips on how to set up filters
Smartphone vs desktop email checking
When and when not to work on emails
And the option of last resort

Data science, big data, business analytics … these are all buzz words in the industry at the moment and the hopes are high on what these areas will provide to our industry.

Cytel organized a long session about data science for the PSI conference 2018 in Amsterdam (learn more and register here).

In this episode, we’ll speak about:

Why is data science such a hot topic at the moment?
How can we separate the different buzz words?
Is this only something for google, amazon and such companies?
What distinguishes a statistician from a data scientist?
What are the biggest areas of impact for data science?
What case studies are there, where data science had a profound impact?
Which problems you might face?
Which role do visualization approaches play in data science?
What’s the difference between “machine learning” and “deep learning”?
What would a statistician need to know, in order to compete in this field?
Where are good resources for this (see also the Cytel blog here)?

Finally, we will dive into the sessions, which Cytel chairs as the main sponsor of the PSI conference. You’ll learn if this session is a good fit for you.

About Yannis Jemiai
Yannis Jemiai has a pivotal role within Cytel, leading the company’s consulting and software business units, as well as the global marketing group. With Cytel Consulting he heads up an elite team of biostatisticians, skilled in applying the latest trial techniques and methods, to help our customers accelerate clinical development and mitigate portfolio risks.

Yannis also oversees the development of Cytel’s software product lines, including trial design packages East® and Compass®, and exact statistics applications StatXact® and LogXact®.  Yannis guides global marketing efforts to raise the awareness of and uncover new opportunities for the company's growing range of clinical research services and specialized software.

His own research has been published in numerous statistical journals. Dr. Jemiai earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.P.H. from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Molecular and Cellular Biology also from Harvard

About Rajat Mukherjee
Rajat Mukherjee has 15 years of professional experience as an industry and academic statistician, and brings a range of expert knowledge to Cytel’s customers. This includes work in pattern recognition problems for devices and biomarker discovery, Bayesian clinical trials, adaptive designs, and design and analysis of complex epidemiological studies. His experience and expertise also includes statistical computing, survival analysis, longitudinal analysis, nonparametric and semiparametric inference, as well as statistical classification and high-dimensional data. Rajat has a strong background and interest in the development and implementation of statistical methodology with application to real life medical problems.

In this episode, we’ll cover Lucys story about her work within PSI and how it helped her to with her promotion. She shares tips and tricks to make it happen and we explore, what it takes to become an active PSI member.

Lucy is the conference chair for the PSI conference 2018 in Amsterdam. As such, we also talk about various hurdles and benefits of running such a large event. Lucy explains what you can expect from this years conference and how learnings from previous conferences are implemented.

Learn more about the details of the program etc and register for the PSI conference 2018 in Amsterdam here.

About Lucy Rowell
Lucy has been an active member of the PSI Scientific Committee for 6 years and this is her final year as the conference chair! Lucy is currently embarking on a 50% rotation into the UK Affiliate, supporting early pipeline molecules, from either a Medical or Marketing perspective.

During her 15 years at Roche, Lucy has enjoyed a 6 month secondment to the US and worked in a number of disease areas including: inflammation, virology, metabolism, infectious diseases and oncology projects, across all phases of clinical development and has been involved in designing a wide variety of trial designs implementing both frequentist and Bayesian approaches.

When not in work, you will most likely find Lucy out listening to live music, walking her dog Buddy or curled up on the sofa reading a good book with a glass of vino.

Are you afraid of asking your supervisor for approval to travel to Amsterdam to attend the PSI conference?

Do you need convincing arguments for them to approve your travel?

In this episode, we talk about arguments, that help you in your discussion with your supervisor. We're talking specifically about the PSI conference 2018 in Amsterdam, but these points will very much be applicable for future PSI conferences as well.

You probably don’t want to tell them, that Amsterdam is a very nice city and the social activities will be lots of fun. But here are some arguments, that might help you to get the approval:

The conference is highly relevant to statisticians in the pharma industry. There are no ivory tower research sessions with little practical applications. All the topics were selected having statisticians in the pharma industry as the target audience in mind. 3 days packed with specialized content.
Many of the sessions will help you to work more effectively in your job with higher quality outcomes. You will learn how other companies solve the same problems that you have.
The vast majority of speakers are very experienced presenters, that will enable you to learn much more in shorter time. Lots of work is put especially into the many invited sessions, to compose the different presentations and give you a holistic experience of a session rather than a collection of vaguely related topics.
There are a number of workshops during which you can learn hands-on skills to apply directly to your work. E.g. you can participate in a development and coaching session targeted especially for statisticians (not a general one, that any training company offers).
During the informal breaks and at the social events in the evening you may meet with your clients (if you work for a CRO) or your vendors (if you work for pharma) and build relationship and trust. This will make current or future collaborations much easier. Alternatively, it may help to build future business relationships.
Are you working on regulatory or HTA submissions? Many sessions and workshops will cover hot topics and after attending them, you will be better prepared for your high-impact contributions to these critical submissions for your business. You will also meet some staff from the HTA and regulatory bodies at the conference.
Do your business partners don’t understand what estimands are? Do they have a hard time to understand the Bayesian concepts that you’re applying? Learn at the conference to better communicate about these topics from industry leads on these fields. This will help you to be more impactful during critical conversations with your business partners and you can provide examples of how others in the industry are solving problems.
#8 Do you have a formal development plan? Put it in there and your supervisors will be happy that there is already something ticked for their HR deliverables. And if this is in-line with your business objectives – even better.
The conference is cheap compared to a DIA meeting or any international medical conference. Take further advantage of the early bird discount rate up to the 21st March 2018.
You have a poster to be presented at the conference. Ok – this only works, if your supervisors approved the submission of the poster. But it is always something for them to sell upwards, that you’re an active contributor. The poster deadline is the 28th Feb 2018.
Not every reason will work in every situation and with every supervisor. Try to understand, what goals your supervisor has and tailor these arguments towards these goals.

Register and find out more about the conference here!

Do you have more reasons to attend? Please leave a comment below.

In this episode, we discuss our experiences in working with various programmers and what we as statisticians can do, to create an environment, where we can work without major disruptions and too many stressful moments. We’ll cover topics such as:

How to increase mutual understanding
How do delegate well
The balance between specifications and workload
Day to day activities to make life better

In this episode, we speak about one of the most important work relationships – the one with the physician. As a statistician we work with them in all kind of things on the job. They also might become great friends.

In the episode, we will cover the following topics:

Topics to increase the understanding where the physician is coming from such as
How was he successful in his previous job – e.g. emergency room setting with command and follow setting to solve urgent crisis
Hospitals and physician’s offices are built with the physician at the center as he is the bottle neck
Has he even been a KOL before joining the company – that’ll make it hard for him to switch to a new culture
Mindset and tactics to create a successful partnership such as
Have 1:1s in which they you can answer their perceived “stupid” questions
be a partner and not a service provider
Present data together with the physician and show him, how you both can benefit
How to become a more valuable partner to the physician by e.g.
Provide draft conclusions based on analyses
Learn his language as you encourage him to learn yours
Have a physician as a mentor to learn how to best work with them
Tips on how to give the physician insights into your job and that it is not a push the button exercise

In our first episode, we talk about

who is writing and talking here,
if this podcast fits your needs and will help you,
how the podcast will boost your career,
and what our approach to podcasting is.
Who is writing and talking here?

We’re Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske. We create and edit the content, in addition to managing our work lives, home lives and being continuous learners. We invite you to come and learn along with us to work more effectively, lead courageously, and solve problems innovatively.

Alexander Schacht
I have studied mathematics and received my PhD in biostatistics on non-parametric statistics from the University of Göttingen in Germany. I authored more than 70 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and regularly speak at international conferences – both statistical ones like PSI and medical ones like EADV. During my career at university and within the pharma industry, I have collected more than 20 years of experience.

My career focused mostly on phase III and IV (RCT, observational studies, HTA submission, commercialization work) with some regulatory work as well as some experience in the early phases of clinical development.

I’m interested in a broad range of methodological areas but specifically on making better decisions based on data. As such, I was the chair of the EFSPI/SPI SIG on benefit-risk for some time. PSI provided my with many more opportunities, which I’m happy to work on.

At work, I supervise of a small but mighty team of statisticians in a large pharma company. The virtual work environment requires me to adjust my communication style and focus on my ability to deliver results effectively.

I’m a happy husband and father of 3 wonderful kids, who I love to spend time with. In the rest of my time, I love running and listening to podcasts.

Benjamin Piske
I got interested in statistics during my studies of mathematics at the university of Göttingen when I attended courses of statistics at the department of medical statistics. Focusing on non-parametric statistics, I completed my MSc in 2003 and continued to work at the department until starting with a global CRO in April 2004. I started as biostatistician in the phase IIIb/IV environment and worked on interventional and non-interventional late phase trials, commercialization work, publication / presentation support, registries and investigator driven trials in several therapeutic areas - mainly oncology, hematology and neurology – using a broad range of statistical methods. During the later stages of my career I also worked on phase II and phase III trials as well as submissions.

In 2008 I took over line management responsibility for a primarily remote team, and since then developed more and more into a senior position. I’m primarily working office based in our office in Berlin, Germany.

Besides the challenging job and the not less challenging family responsibilities with having 4 children, I love to travel, occasionally play squash, but more frequently record podcast episodes with Alexander :-)

Learn more about us in our first episode of the podcast and check out our linkedin profiles:

Alexander
Benjamin
Is this podcast for you?
The Effective Statistician helps statisticians (or maybe data scientist) both at a junior and experienced level. We’ll cover topics relevant for those with and without administrative leadership positions. Our examples arise from the health sector mainly, but we assume, that statisticians or data scientists outside of this industry will surely benefit as well.

How will this podcast boost your career?
Learning and following up on the topics in our podcast will help you to become more effective at work through:

learning about ongoing methodological discussions
Applying better statistical methods
building competency
becoming a leader (with or without an administrative title)
Influencing without authority
Building your brand
Getting the right things done effectively
Collaborating effectively with