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AMWA GCAC March Networking Dinner
On March 5, 2007, 34 GCAC-AMWA members and guests convened at Wildfire in Lincolnshire for an evening of relaxed conversation and great food, followed by an informal and delightfully humorous presentation by a local statistician working in the pharmaceutical industry. The focus of his presentation was to share his insights on the medical writing process from a statistician’s perspective. He quickly thwarted any preconceived notions of a dry and stolid lecture, sharing a quick explanation of how one can distinguish the introvert form the extrovert when two statisticians are passing each other in the hall. The answer? The extrovert is looking at the other person's shoes!
With nearly 15 years of industry experience, the statistician shared his insights on the medical writing process, based mainly on his involvement in clinical trial design and statistical analysis, having collaborated with medical writers on numerous clinical study reports, New Drug Application documents, and publications. He elucidated the roles and responsibilities of statisticians in designing studies, determining sample size, and programming and interpreting study data. He also covered some of the basic statistical terminology that so often perplexes writers.
The presentation was followed by a question and answer period in which attendees were afforded the opportunity to ask their most burning statistical questions. Among the topics discussed were confidence intervals, natural logarithms, and standard deviation versus standard error. In addressing attendees’ questions, the speaker cited Tom Lang’s book, How to Report Statistics in Medicine, as a valuable resource.
-Caryn Kim
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