List of Upcoming Events

Unlocking the Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Coffee Chat with Industry Experts

Join us for an exclusive virtual coffee chat via Zoom, hosted by the BU Student Chapter of ASA in collaboration with the Boston Chapter of ASA. This one-hour panel discussion, focusing on the pharmaceutical industry, is your gateway to insights on:

- Finding Internships: What to look for and where to start.

- Resume Crafting: How to make your resume stand out for internships and full-time positions.

- Preparing for Interviews: Tips and expected questions for internship interviews.

- Becoming a Full-Time Pharmaceutical Employee: Skills needed and transition guidance.

Engage with distinguished panelists, each bringing unique perspectives:

Wenting Cheng is a Sr. Principal Biostatistician at Biogen. She works in the Alzheimer's & Movement Disorders Biostatistics Group, and she is also involved in the focus group exploring Bayesian applications in Clinical Development. Her research interests include Bayesian analysis, endpoint development, meta-analysis and subgroup identification. She received a PhD degree in Biostatistics in 2017 from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the President of American Statistical Association Boston Chapter. Email: chengwt@umich.edu

Jianchang Lin is Senior Director, Statistics in Takeda Pharmaceuticals with extensive drug development experience across various therapeutic areas in oncology, cell therapy, immunology and rare disease including several successful global approvals and access in US, EU, Japan and China. He has published over 50 papers in statistical and clinical peer-reviewed journals/book chapters and served as editors for two books published in Springer with research interests in innovative trial designs, quantitative decision making, RWD/RWE and advanced data science. He is also an Associate Editor of Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics and currently serving as program chair elect for ASA Biopharmaceutical section, Industry Co-chair for 2024 Regulatory-Industry Statistics Workshop, etc. Email: Jianchang.Lin@Takeda.com

Kush Kapur currently holds a Director, Biostatistics position at Argenx, Inc, where he is responsible for modeling and simulations, focusing on the operational characteristics of adaptive clinical trials, Bayesian Go/No-Go criteria, estimands strategy, and complex joint models. Before joining Argenx, he gained experience in various pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, Biogen, and Alexion. Additionally, he worked as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School for more than six years. During his tenure, he supervised numerous randomized clinical trials, providing valuable insights to investigators on critical medical inquiries. His expertise spans a wide range of areas, including randomized clinical trials, observational data, survey methods, translational and basic science, and novel devices. He has made significant contributions to the biostatistics and medical field, authoring over 100 peer-reviewed articles and a book chapter. He has also played a role in the development of several standalone statistical software applications. Email: kush.kapur.79@gmail.com

Qing Li is the director of Biostatistics and Programming at MorphoSys US Inc. He is the group leader of the US biostatistics and programming team and the global program lead biostatistician of Pelabresib development. His research interests include adaptive trial designs, real-world evidence analysis, and surrogate endpoints and patient reported outcomes. He received his master’s degree and PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Iowa in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Email: qingli7410@gmail.com

The session includes a live Q&A and the exclusive opportunity for BU students to participate in 1-1 coffee chats in breakout Zoom rooms. Whether you're starting to look for an internship or seeking guidance for full-time employment, this session is tailored to your needs.

Time: September 22, from 1:00 – 2:00 PM (EST)

Platform: Zoom (link to be provided upon registration)

Reserve your spot today and connect with industry leaders like Wenting Cheng, Jianchang Lin, Kush Kapur, and Qing Li to unlock your potential in the pharmaceutical field. Embrace the wisdom of industry experts and take the next step in your pharmaceutical career journey.

Please contact Russell Goebel at rgoebel@bu.edu to get more info about registration.

ASA Travelling Course

We are excited to host the ASA Traveling Course: From R Markdown to Quarto this fall. This will be a one-day virtual event.

Title: From R Markdown to Quarto

Instructors: Andrew Bray, UC Berkeley, and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Duke University and RStudio

Date: September 30, 2023

Time: 9:00AM – 3:00PM

Registration:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-r-markdown-to-quarto-tickets-677655996327

Course Abstract:
This workshop is designed for those who want to take their R Markdown skills and expertise and apply them in Quarto, the next generation of R Markdown. Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that offers multilingual programming language support to create dynamic and static documents, books, presentations, blogs, and other online resources. In this workshop you will learn how to apply your reproducible authoring skills to the Quarto format and learn about new tools and workflows for authoring with Quarto in RStudio. You will learn to create static documents as well as slide presentations. The workshop will also introduce you to Quarto projects which you can use to build websites and write blogs and books. Finally, you will learn various ways to deploy and publish your Quarto projects on the web.

Course learning objectives:

●      Explore the similarities and differences between R Markdown and Quarto as a framework for doing reproducible data analysis.

●      Author documents that integrate R code with explanatory text and some advanced features useful for scientific manuscripts such as cross references and citations.

●      Create slide presentations that utilize the dynamic functionality of revealjs.

●      Build and publish a website to feature the documents and slide presentations that you have created.

Course outline:

1hr 15min - Hello Quarto

15min - break

1hr 15min - Documents

30min - break

1hr 15min - Presentations

15min - break

1hr 15min - Websites

About the Instructors:

Andrew Bray is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley where he develops and teaches courses in statistics and data science. His research interests include statistical computing, data privacy, and applications of statistical models to environmental science. He is one of the authors of the infer R package for resampling based inference and an enthusiastic user of all things R Markdown / Quarto.
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is Professor of the Practice at Duke University and Developer Educator at RStudio. Mine’s work focuses on innovation in statistics and data science pedagogy, with an emphasis on computing, reproducible research, student-centered learning, and open-source education as well as pedagogical approaches for enhancing retention of women and under-represented minorities in STEM. Mine is a Fellow of the ASA and Elected Member of the ISI as well as the winner of the 2021 Robert V. Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics.

Decoding the Beatles: Dr. Mark Glickman's Data-Driven Exploration of Lennon-McCartney's Song Authorship

The Boston Chapter of the ASA and the Harvard University student chapter (GUSH) are co-organizing the following event. We are thrilled to host Dr. Mark Glickman for his captivating presentation. 

Title: Data Tripper: Distinguishing Authorship of Beatles Songs via Data Science

Date: Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 

Time: 7:00 - 8:00 pm

Location: Science Center Lecture Hall A, Harvard University, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA 02138.

Cost: Free

Abstract:

The songwriting duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the two founding members of the Beatles, have composed some of the most popular and memorable songs of the last century. Despite having authored songs under the joint credit agreement of Lennon-McCartney, it is well-documented that most of their songs or portions of songs were primarily written by exactly one of the two. Some Lennon-McCartney songs, such as "In My Life", are actually of disputed authorship - both Lennon and McCartney individually remembered having written the music.  We developed a prediction model on the 70 Lennon-McCartney songs or song portions of known authorship based on variable screening followed by logistic regression with elastic net regularization. The results of our modeling were applied to songs and song portions with unknown or disputed authorship.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at the Harvard University Department of Statistics, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Innovation. His research interests are primarily in the areas of statistical models for rating competitors in games and sports, and in statistical methods applied to problems in health services research.  Dr. Glickman serves as chair of the ASA Committee on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and is chair of the US Chess ratings committee.

REGISTER HERE!

Note on Oct 19: Dear BCASA members and non-members, the registration for this event is closed.

2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award Event

We are pleased to announce that a reception will be held for the Boston Chapter's 2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award. This reception is a collaboration with the Harvard Statistics Department. 

Honoree and Speaker: Nicholas J. Horton, Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College

Date: Oct 30, 2023, 6 - 8 pm EDT

Location: Science Center 316, Harvard Statistics Department, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA 02138

Registration at Eventbrite: Registration

Presentation Title: From the Federalist papers to ChatGPT

Description: 60 years ago, Fred Mosteller and David Wallace published a paper in JASA that made inferences in an important authorship problem: the Federalist papers. Notwithstanding this groundbreaking work, text continues to be an important example of unstructured data that has traditionally been nearly absent from the statistics curriculum in secondary schools and early post-secondary education, despite the importance that the written word has in all aspects of education and society. In this talk, Dr. Horton will review Mosteller's work and legacy, describe a more modern classification problem, discuss how new learners approached text analytics, and conclude with some thoughts about statistics and data science amidst the advent of powerful generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard.

Speaker Bio: Nicholas J. Horton, Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Statistics and Data Science) at Amherst College has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 Mosteller Statistician of the Year award by the Boston Chapter. This award honors individuals from academia, industry, and government who have made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and who have shown outstanding service to the statistical community, including the Boston Chapter.

Dr. Horton is recognized for his numerous innovative contributions to statistics and data science education. He has written multiple books and papers in the fields of statistics and data science education and missing data. He is one of the authors of the revised GAISE College guidelines. He is a Vice President of the American Statistical Association and co-chair of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He has previously served on the ASA Council of Chapters and Council of Sections and chaired the Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistics working group, ASA’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education, the ASA/NCTM K-12 Joint Committee, and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He was elected an ASA Fellow in 2012, a Fellow of the AAAS in 2018 and received the ASA's Founders Award.

About the Award: Every year the Boston Chapter presents the Mosteller Statistician of the Year award to a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and has shown outstanding service to the statistical community. A list of the past award winners can be found at https://community.amstat.org/bostonchapter/awards/mostellerstatistician

The 25th New England Isolated Statisticians Meeting (NEISM25) 
The meeting has been tentatively scheduled to take place in November, 2022. We will send out a notice as soon as we have more definite information. Please do not hesitate to contact one of us if you have questions.

Stay safe and well. Regards,

The NEISM25 Organizing Committee

John McKenzie (mckenzie@babson.edu)

Bob Goldman (robert.goldman@simmons.edu) Rob Carver (rhcarver5@gmail.com)

Michael Sale (msale@stonehill.edu)

Analytics Without Borders 2023