Biostatisticians, Biostatistical Science and the Future

Marvin Zelen, Harvard University

The EMR has been founded in the” Information Century”. Nearly all of us have ready access to enormous communication and computational capabilities which were undreamed of a few decades ago. Many of us are on the Internet every day. This has changed the way we practice our science. Chief amongst these is the globalization of the way biostatistics is practiced. This talk will discuss several emerging issues which affect the current and future practice of our profession.  For example we have not fully taken advantage of the potential of our communication resources to educate our biostatical scientists. I propose that our profession assemble courses on the internet which would be freely available. Many faculty have favorite courses which could be made widely available. It is very routine to teach using slides. These slide format courses can easily be put on the Internet. Consequently, with guidance from a faculty member (or a knowledgeable person), a biostatistics student could have access to the same courses taught in major centers of biostatistics.  The courses could range from the most elementary to the most advanced.  Not only can course materials become available, but seminars as well. The EMR can take a leadership role in initiating the organization of such a project. This would be especially important in the EMR where biostatistics faculty is very widely dispersed. Most universities have very few biostatics staff. A model for making courses/seminars available on the Internet already exists in the field of epidemiology.(www.pitt.edu/~super1) At the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Ron LaPorte and his colleagues have collected more than 2000 courses and seminars which are freely available on the internet. The courses are mainly in English, but there are several courses in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. A few lectures are available in Arabic, Croatian, Georgian, Indonesian, Macedonian, Serbian, Korean and Japanese The contributors come from 151 countries. Professor LaPorte has kindly agreed to assist in the EMR if it wishes to launch such a project. In addition to this education effort, I will discuss other leadership issues relating to emerging new fields of application and the role of Biostatistical Scientists.

Download the speech in MS Word format here.