Stats + Stories The Stats + Stories Team

The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which lasted from November 2020 to November 2022, left as many as 600 thousand people dead. The war fought by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on one side and Ethiopian and Eritrean forces on the other also had a devastating impact on the health-system in Tigray. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guests James J. Cochran and Mulugeta Gebregziabher.

James J. Cochran is associate dean for research with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College. He is also a professor of statistics and the Rogers-Spivey Research Fellow.

Mulugeta Gebregziabher is professor of biostatistics and vice chair for academic programmes at the Medical University of South Carolina. He is a health scientist investigator and methods core leader with the Health Equity and Rural Outreach Innovation Center of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research & Development, and director of the Region IV Public Health Training Center for South Carolina.

The views expressed in this episode only represent the opinions of Gebregziabher and Cochran and not any institutions they represent.

Athletes around the world are preparing to live out their Olympic dreams in Paris this summer. Many of those athletes have been competing in national and world championships before participating in Olympic trials in order to join their national teams. But how can an athlete be sure they’re peaking at the right time? How can they know whether adding an additional element to a routine or changing the angle of a throw will give them an advantage over the competition? Well, there’s data for that and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Daniel Webb

Dan Webb is the Director of Performance Analytics at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) in Colorado Springs and accomplished leader in performance analytics and sports science, using innovative data science and statistical modeling methods to solve challenging performance problems. Dan has led efforts to develop and implement cutting-edge solutions to model and predict Olympic-level performance, enabling data-informed decision-making for both the USOPC and NGBs. Under Dan's leadership, the Performance Innovation department continues to provide integrated and sustained competitive advantages for Team USA by deriving insights from data to improve athlete performance and optimize training, competition, and resource allocation strategies.

Dennis Trewin is a pioneer of social statistics that are leading to meaningful measurement of social capital in Australia. He was the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 2000 and 2007, and held other senior appointments in Australia such as Electoral Commissioner and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University. Dennis is also a member of the Committee charged with responsibility for producing an independent report on the State of the Environment.

We leave data behind as we travel across the internet, our preferences and purchases transforming into a veritable goldmine of information for companies hoping to convince us to buy their new product or service. We often imagine this data mining and tracking as an invention of the so-called information age, but Victorians were tracking and mining data too. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Dr. James Hanley

Hanley is a professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His work has received several awards including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Lifetime Achievement Award.

When a gene in the human body goes bad, it can cause illness and disease. Scientists have been working for decades to develop therapies to address faulty genes. In the U.S. gene therapy has been approved as a treatment for illnesses such as cancer, hemophilia, AIDS. However, as researchers explore treatment possibilities. The ethics and costs of such treatments remain a concern. A new book aims to provide an overview of the state of gene therapy development which is the focus of this episode of Stat+Stories with guests Avery McIntosh and Oleksandr Sverdlov.

Dr. McIntosh is a drug developer working in rare diseases at Pfizer. He has managed teams of statisticians across study phases and in a variety of drug types and disease areas, including neurology, ophthalmology, infectious disease/ global health, hematology, and oncology. He has published peer-reviewed articles on various topics in drug development and biostatistics, including development of cell and gene therapies and qualification of digital endpoints in neurological diseases.

Dr. Sverdlov is a Neuroscience Disease Area Statistical Lead at Novartis. He has been actively involved in methodological research and applications of innovative statistical approaches in drug development. He has co-authored over forty refereed articles, edited two monographs, and co-authored a book ``Mathematical and Statistical Skills in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: A Pragmatic Approach''. His most recent work involves design and analysis of clinical trials evaluating novel digital technologies.

Pandemic Education History | Stats + Short Stories Episode 332 by The Stats + Stories Team