Practicing Biostatistics at BC Children’s Research Institute: Collaborations, Challenges and Considerations

Biostatistics is a field that requires multi-disciplinary collaboration between statisticians, medical professionals and other subject-domain experts. Over the last several years, BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHRI) has built a biostatistics core to provide expertise to their research community on development of appropriate study design and analysis methods for clinical and public health research. This talk will outline the experience of leading the biostatistics unit, key skills for success in applied settings when working with non-statistical collaborators, and the tension between theoretical best practice and the constraints of real-world data. Examples of projects from BCCHRI will be used to illustrate statistical techniques and challenges. 

To join this seminar virtually, please request Zoom connection details from ea@stat.ubc.ca. 

Jeff Bone is the Biostatistical Lead at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. In this role, he provides methodological input to clinical and epidemiological research studies across a range of disciplines, supervises analysts and trainees, and provides community education. He has a PhD in Women’s and Children’s Health (UBC) focused on statistical methods and modelling in perinatal epidemiology, an MSc in Statistics (UBC) and BSc (Hons) in Mathematics and Statistics (UVic). His current areas of statistical research include analysis of population level data, causal inference for observational data and design and analysis of randomized controlled trials. His main areas of applied work are in perinatal epidemiology, obstetrics, and pediatric diabetes.