‘I Don’t See Demand Slowing Down’.

Lisa Sullivan Associate Dean for Education; Professor of Biostatistics

Hometown: Danvers, Massachusetts

Breakfast: “I had the same thing I have every day, which is yogurt with blueberries, raisins, and mixed nuts.”

Office Conversation Piece: Donna Summer poster (a gift from Sophie Godley, clinical assistant professor of community health sciences)

What is new in the recently published third edition of your textbook, Essentials of Biostatistics in Public Health?

What’s new in this third edition is a new chapter on data visualization, which I think is really important because it’s important for students—and all of us—to accurately convey data and information in tables and graphs. There’s so much data out there, and being able to communicate it effectively was really what I was trying to get after.

Also, at the beginning of each chapter, I added a section called “When and Why.” For each topic, I tried to look at a current example or event where someone might use the statistical technique that we’re going to talk about. I tried to raise a few provocative questions with each event to get students thinking.

Why add those “When and Why?” sections?

Sometimes with math classes—and other subjects too—as a student you might not see or think that what you’re learning is something you’re actually going to use at a future point. But for biostatistics it’s really easy to show people that what we’re talking about is actually being used every day. Students and educated citizens need to understand statistics because statistics are in the news, in the newspapers, in journal articles, so I tried to make that connection explicit. This is what I do when I’m teaching a class.

For example, I was working on this new edition last summer, when there was so much going on with Zika, so that was the “When and Why” for the chapter on estimating prevalence and incidence. I put in questions like, “What is happening with Zika?” “Is it an important issue for you and in your community?” “If you were going to travel to the Caribbean, or to Florida, would you be worried?” I also directed readers to the CDC travel guidelines so that  students can see how organizations collect data and report them. My hope is that students might look at those and think, Oh, what I’m doing in class actually does get translated.

You mentioned the “Am I really going to use this?” challenge of teaching some subjects. How do you handle that with biostatistics?

A lot of people come into my class who have not taken many, or any, college-level math courses. For a lot of people something happens to them in elementary school or middle school that makes them uncomfortable, fearful, not confident in the subject. A lot of what I find myself doing in teaching is just trying to build people’s confidence. Mastering statistical skills is not beyond anybody, it’s just that if you feel you’re not good at it then it’s hard to get through while you’re drinking from a fire hose. So in my own teaching I try to help people build their own confidence.

There are also tons of jobs in biostats. In every one of my classes, literally in the first class, I have a slide that says there’s tremendous demand for people with training in biostatistics and the need is growing. The students all look at me thinking, There’s no possible way. But then as time goes on I keep at it, and some of them take up biostatistics.

There is a ton of data out there already and more being generated every day, but data is not information. We need people—biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and so many others—to understand how to turn data into useful information that you can use. I don’t see the demand slowing down for people with those kinds of skills.

Is that demand being met?

That is something of an issue—because I can tell you, when I was a math major I didn’t even know what biostatistics was. Now, I think there’s a little bit more recognition, especially with all of the public health programs that are popping up at the undergraduate level. But there are a lot of students in math or other areas who just don’t know that biostats is an option.

One of the things that we have been fortunate with here at SPH is our Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics. This is the 14th year of running that program, and I think it’s been a phenomenal success. Some of the participants are math majors or stats majors, but some are in engineering, sociology, psychology, religion—we’ve had everything, and we’ve been able to show them the opportunities that exist in biostatistics.

There are also a lot more statistics being taught in high schools and in undergraduate institutions now. That’s another reason I enjoy working on the textbook: helping the people who are teaching those young students, providing resources to make it interesting and relevant for them, I think will only help to build this pipeline.

—Michelle Samuels