Educating Statisticians to Become Interdisciplinary Collaborators

• Activity Number: 556
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Consulting
• Author(s): Eric Vance*+
• Companies: Virginia Tech
• Keywords: statistical consulting ; interdisciplinary collaboration ; video-recorded meetings ; LISA ; student education ; student training

Abstract

Graduate students in the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA) at Virginia Tech are trained to become effective statistical collaborators. They learn how to manage, display, analyze, and write about data in an introductory course and then learn and apply effective communication skills in the course "Communication in Statistical Collaborations," which aims to teach them what they need to know to be effective statistical collaborators that they don't learn in their more technical statistics courses. In their third and future semesters students work in LISA: 1) Teaching short courses on statistical topics for graduate students from other departments to apply in their research; 2) Answering quick statistical questions in LISA Walk-in Consulting; 3) Providing advice on experimental design, modeling, data analysis, and interpretation of statistical results to researchers across campus; 4) Collaborating on multidisciplinary research projects around the world.

Students continue their training by giving and receiving feedback and by analyzing video-recorded meetings to learn and practice strategies for improving their statistical consulting and collaboration skills.