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What’s Next for Biostatistics?

I believe biostatistics is at a tremendously exciting time. The volume of data that is currently being produced, both actively and passively, is beyond what many of us could have ever imagined. For example, most of us are passively generating data that is being captured by smart devices that are rarely unattached from (or far from) our bodies, every minute of every day. The potential to use these data to understand and improve health is enormous. However, those data are not being generated for the expressed purpose of “studying health.” As biostatisticians, we must temper our excitement with that acknowledgement.

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 What are the biggest challenges facing biostatisticians today?

One of the main challenges for biostatisticians is to ensure the quality and availability of the data they use for their analyses. Data quality can be affected by various factors, such as measurement errors, missing values, outliers, confounding variables, and bias. Data availability can be limited by ethical, legal, and logistical issues, such as privacy, consent, data sharing, and data storage. Biostatisticians need to apply appropriate methods and tools to check, clean, manage, and protect their data, and to deal with any data quality and availability issues that may arise.

Articles of Interest

A Day in the Life of a Biostatistician

To me, biostatistics seemed to be the application of some high school-level math to biological problems. I had no concept of what a degree in biostatistics, and much less a career as a biostatistician, could entail. Endless Google searches with some variant of “what does a biostatistician do” and even “day in the life of a biostatistician” had not given me a very good picture of what I would actually be doing as a biostatistician.

Effectively Working with Biostatisticians as Collaborators

While it may be advantageous to have a senior biostatistician on your grant, there are benefits to finding one who is at a similar stage in their career as you are.

How to Become a Biostatistician: Is it the Right Career for You?

Biostatisticians play a critical role in public health, medicine, and research, using statistical methods to analyze and interpret biological data. This could be the right career if you want to combine your love for data analysis with positively impacting health and science.

Reflections on the Transition from Master’s to PhD Biostatistician

Being a biostatistician is a rewarding experience. Working at the intersection of math, biology, health care, and data science, a biostatistician applies rigorous mathematical and scientific thinking to solve real-world problems in medicine and public health. Biostatisticians have diverse careers collaborating with scientists across a range of disciplines on research study design and data analysis. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more people are choosing to pursue and advance careers in biostatistics and health data science.

What Does a Biostatistician Do?

Biostatisticians are data collectors and analysts who focus on biological data for fields such as medicine, agriculture, and public health. In many ways, biostatisticians are the unsung heroes and wizards of health and data science–producing, analyzing, and verifying statistics that enable us to solve complex problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, biostatisticians verify statistics like, “The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 after vaccination is about 5 in 100,000.”

Why do you need a biostatistician?

The quality of medical research importantly depends, among other aspects, on a valid statistical planning of the study, analysis of the data, and reporting of the results, which is usually guaranteed by a biostatistician. However, there are several related professions next to the biostatistician, for example epidemiologists, medical informaticians and bioinformaticians. For medical experts, it is often not clear what the differences between these professions are and how the specific role of a biostatistician can be described.