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UBC Statistics MSc students Co-op Talks I

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 16:00 to 17:30
Shirley Cui, UBC Statistics MSc student; Shuyi Tan, UBC Statistics MSc student; Zhipeng Zhu, UBC Statistics MSc student
Zoom

To join via Zoom: To join this seminar, please request Zoom connection details from headsec [at] stat.ubc.ca.

Presentation 1

Time: 4:00pm – 4:30pm

Speaker: Shirley Cui, UBC Statistics MSc student

Title: Co-op experience in a Contract Research Organization(CRO) company: phase I-III clinical trials

Abstract: I started my industrial experience with a junior statistician position in a CRO company that provides clinical trial management services (eg. clinical research project management, on-site management, data management, statistical analysis, etc.) for the pharmaceutical industry companies. I mainly assist senior statistician with study design, sample size calculation, randomization list generation, eCRF review and annotation etc. I would like to share my coop experience in participating research projects involving phase I-III clinical trials and provide insights to those who are interested in pursuing a career in this field.

Presentation 2

Time: 4:30pm – 5:00pm

Speaker: Shuyi Tan, UBC Statistics MSc student

Title: Data Analytics in Healthcare

Abstract: The healthcare industry collects vast amounts of health data. Analysis of these data informs important decisions related to healthcare delivery, evaluation, and quality management. For the past 12 months, Shuyi has been working as a business analyst at Fraser Health Authority focusing on process improvement and data analysis. She would like to talk about her experience working with healthcare data in terms of data acquisition, data mining, insight extraction, and potential challenges. Since the data-related inquiries from clinical specialists will be quite different from those from an academic setting, examples would be provided to give some insights into how to approach these real-world questions.

Presentation 3

Time: 5:00pm – 5:30pm

Speaker: Zhipeng Zhu, UBC Statistics MSc student

Title: Practical Tools for Junior Data Analyst: From Graphic Software to DSLs

Abstract: This presentation talks about some experience as an entry-level data analyst or data scientist and introduces the idea of participating in DSL development.

Compared to academic tasks in many statistics courses, the actual work content as an analyst or consultant is quite different. While statistic knowledge is indispensable, using tools flexibly has become more critical in many workloads. To deal with complicated cases, analytic software with graphic UI has become an essential tool for most analysts. These graphic software offer excellent plot outputs and a superior feature of document generation compared to coding style tools such as R. However, graphic software sometimes cost the performance for particular tasks, and hence we require the hard-coded programs. This inspires me to participate in developing R packages “distplyr” and “distionary” as DSLs with Vincenzo Coia. Even though we still need to use coding languages for many specific tasks, a good DSL will significantly improve our productivity.