Statisticians
Emma Pritchard
As part of the group, I work as a Statistician. My role involves using data to help answer important and interesting questions about infectious diseases. A typical day at work is mostly spent at my computer, exploring data by plotting graphs, and using statistical methods and models to answer research questions. I often use anonymised data which is collected from patient’s who visit a hospital in Oxfordshire. I work on answering questions such as “How can we monitor if diseases are increasing or decreasing over time?”.
To become a statistician, you’ll likely need an undergraduate degree in a maths-based subject. A master’s degree specialising in Statistics will also be useful! The pathway I took was to do an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences, followed by a master’s degree in Medical Statistics.
“I am currently working towards a DPhil, so my role involves writing up the research I do into chapters for my thesis”.
Phuong Quan
I am a Statistician and Data Manager. My work mainly focusses on electronic health records, their use in epidemiological studies, and how they are managed and processed in the Infections in Oxfordshire Research Database (IORD). I use statistical software such as R and Stata to write code that for instance, finds out how the presence of certain diseases change in the population over time. To become a statistician you generally need a postgraduate degree in Statistics and an interest in the subject area. On the IORD project, I am responsible for keeping the data in the database up-to-date, available and reusable.
Eric Budgell
Statisticians work closely with other healthcare professionals and scientists to design medical studies and analyse data, answering research questions that improve care for patients. Often, this data comes from electronic health records or disease surveillance systems, and may include small focused studies or large analyses with millions of patients. To determine the safety and effectiveness of new therapies or ways of providing care, statisticians often design randomised controlled trials, making key decisions about the study size, randomisation strategy, and analytic methods. The ARK-Hospital study is an example of a randomised trial that statisticians in our department recently conducted – the study included 40 hospitals across the UK and evaluated a behaviour change intervention to reduce antibiotic overuse in hospitals. Data for the study came from hospital pharmacies, microbiology labs, and electronic records from about 7.6 million hospital admissions. Analysing the data required programming skills, using specialised software (e.g., R, Stata, SAS, etc). To become a medical statistician, people often study quantitative subjects such as mathematics, biostatistics, and epidemiology, and a graduate degree is typically required (masters or PhD).