Fostering the Culture of Collaboration at Virginia Tech

• Activity Number: 483
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Consulting
• Author(s): Eric A. Vance*+
• Companies: Virginia Tech
• Keywords: statistical collaboration ; LISA ; communication ; effective strategies ; statistial consulting

Abstract

In 2008, LISA (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis) was created from its predecessor, the Statistics Consulting Center, to focus more on statistical collaboration in research projects than on providing a statistical consulting service. LISA's mission is to train statistics students to become interdisciplinary collaborators and to demonstrate the value of statistical thinking through collaboration on research projects. LISA provides statistical advice, analysis, and education to Virginia Tech researchers by offering individual collaboration meetings, walk-in consulting, educational short courses, and support for interdisciplinary research projects. LISA's statistical collaborators are trained to help researchers design experiments, analyze and plot data, run statistical software, interpret results, and communicate statistical concepts to non-statisticians. The graduate students in LISA apply these skills while working on between 2 and 20 collaborative projects each semester. In this talk, I will describe successful strategies and structures we have implemented in LISA and will discuss failed strategies so that others may learn from these examples.