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In order to make new drugs available to patients in Australia, a successful interaction with the PBAC – the Australian HTA body is needed. Alan Brnabic lives in Australia and collected a lot of experience with these submissions over the years.

In this episode, we cover:
- the basics of understanding how the PBAC works,
- why a successful PBAC submission is important,
- what evidence is needed to have a successful PBAC submission,
- how much work is needed from the statistician’s side for the PBAC interactions,
- what are the typical challenges from the PBAC,
- when is a good start to get prepared for the PBAC work, and
- how is the data submitted to PBAC publicly available.

theeffectivestatistician.com

In this podcast episode, we discuss an important part of leadership - proactive behaviour. Or simply put - drive!

As a statistician, you’re day-to-day approach about this topic will build up to long-term success.

We discuss various aspects of drive including:

- how it relates to your goals,
- what it takes to think strategically,
- which role innovation has here,
- what practical steps to take to drive teams forward,
- which knowledge to acquire to lead teams successfully,
- how this relates to influencing,
- and how your attitude will play a big role in this.

Ok – not everything, but in this episode you will get all the tips to make sure, you avoid the most common mistakes and that your code looks professional.

Shafi Chowdhury is an expert programmer who has developed a style guide, which his clients apply broadly. He regularly gives trainings on SAS programming and build his own company based on these skills.

He walks us through the different points and clarifies, why they are important from an efficiency but also from a quality perspective.

theeffectivestatistician.com

In this episode, we’ll cover an amazing story by one of the best programmers and mentors I ever worked with - Shafi Chowdhury (www.shaficonsultancy.com).

We’ll explore how it changed from being a freelance programmer only to building his company on the side. He had a great vision in mind, that drove him forward.

You’ll also hear about his approach to teaching and mentoring – or in general helping people do their job better. His abundance mindset inspires me a lot. Shafi explains, why and how he made his own job redundant in his own company.

Retention is a major cost driver and disrupts some companies a lot. You’ll learn how he manages to have nearly no turn-over in his company and how is approach to recruiting and training new employees fits in to this.

Further, we’ll cover how and why Shafi and his team is regularly presenting at different conferences. We’ll especially go deeper on this presentation at the PSI conference in 2017 about an amazing tool to analyse and visualize data at the same time. His approach to delivering all this innovation is very unique.

Finally, you’ll learn a lot about the leadership attitude, that helped him grow his business fast into a medium sized CRO with a very stable client base.

In this episode we share out ideas and experience, which mindset sets up statisticians for success. We cover topics around:

- Leading people
- Convincing business partners
- Delivering value and selling it - and what does selling means
- Thinking outside the status quo to improve things in the long run 
- Always learning about the business and the people in the business
- Learning about statistical innovation
- Doing things more effectively
- Becoming more impactfully
- Raising your business acumen - internally and externally
- Having quality in mind 

Quote of the Episode by Bill Gates “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

The guest in this episode represents the sponsor of this show - Nigel Howitt - current chair of PSI.

After a short introduction of Nigel and his experience with PSI, we will cover the following topics:

- How can someone, that is interested become a new PSI member?
- What rules are there for students?
- If you’re a data scientist in the pharma industry- is PSI the right association?
- How to get most out of PSI?
- What are the different ways, you can become more engaged within PSI?
- How can you get involved with one of the PSI committees? 
- What’s the role of the SIGs and how do you get involved there?
- What Nigel is recommending new members of PSI as first steps?
- What are your highlights of the PSI conference in Amsterdam?

Finally, we'll also discuss how to get most out of the conference.

In this podcast episode, we tackle a difficult topic for a podcast, but Zak provides lots of expertise in this field and will introduce you to what visual analytics is and how it will help you.

Furthermore, we touch on questions like:

What is the difference that visual analytics plays in 'exploring/learning' and 'messaging'?
Why is visual analytics important? Why should I care?
How does the job of a statistician in visual analytics look like?
Is visual analytics purely descriptive and exploratory in nature?
What does the future of visual analytics in the pharma industry will bring?
How can you implement these approaches in your day to day work?
What tools are there for beginners, people with decent programming or advanced programming skills?
What are the other places to learn more about Visual Analytics? (IEEE VIS: InfoViz, SciViz, and VAST; Flowing Data; Perceptual Edge)
What you can expect from Zaks presentation at this years PSI conference in the wednesday morning session “A picture says more than 1000 tables- interactive data review using visual analytics”

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