This week's biostatistics seminar speaker will be Jeffrey Morris of University of Pennsylvania. 

A Seat at the Table: The Key Role of Biostatistics and Data Science in a Pandemic

Abstract:

The novel virus SARS-CoV-2 has produced a global pandemic, forcing doctors and policymakers to “fly blind,” trying to deal with a virus and disease they knew virtually nothing about. Sorting through the information in real time has been a daunting process—processing data, media reports, commentaries, and research articles. In the USA this is exacerbated by an ideologically divided society that has difficulty with mutual trust, or even agreement on common facts.  The skills underlying our statistical profession are central to this knowledge discovery process, filtering out biases, aggregating disparate data sources together, dealing with measurement error and missing data, identifying key insights while quantifying the uncertainty in these insights, and then communicating the results in an accessible balanced way.  As a result, we have a central role to play in society to bring our perspective and expertise to bear on the pandemic to help ensure knowledge is efficiently discovered and put into practice.  Unfortunately, our profession is often shy about asserting its perspective in broader societal ventures, perhaps not realizing the central importance of our perspective and mindset.  I have authored a website and blog that represents my own person efforts to disseminate information I have found reliable and insightful regarding the pandemic, accounting for subtle scientific and data analytical issues and uncertainties about our current knowledge, and seeking to filter out political and other subjective biases.

In this talk, I will discuss the motivation and some of the themes of my blog, highlighting some key insights I’ve learned during the pandemic. This includes specific unique challenges based on the nature of the pandemic, e.g. our lack of knowledge about the virus coming in, the urgency to learn and act quickly, yet the necessity to think carefully and rigorously to avoid false steps and conclusions.  Also, I will discuss some insights I have learned interacting with the media during this pandemic, and try to clearly communicate the important of our profession and people with our quantitative skill sets to engage and have a seat at the table to have our perspective heard, by both policymakers and the media, during this crisis.  People in our profession need to have better communication with policymakers, and many in our field may not recognize their potential or the importance of our skill set and perspective to the big decisions being made at the societal level.

Jeffrey S. Morris, PhD

Professor

Director, Division of Biostatistics

Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics

Perelman School of Medicine

University of Pennsylvania

https://works.bepress.com/jeffrey_s_morris/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=neVkiWoAAAAJ&hl=en

@jsm2334

Area Editor, Biology, Medicine and Genomics for The Annals of Applied Statistics