Biostatistician by design: from prisons to prions by Royal Statistical Society ..read more

Dr Anna Heath is a biostatistician at SickKids Hospital in Toronto within the Child Health Evaluative Sciences (CHES) program, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and an honorary research fellow at University College London in the Department of Statistical Science. We spoke with Anna about the application of health economic ideas to the conception, design and analysis of clinical trials, and in particular the concept of the Value of Information whereby we can quantify the economic value of obtaining information through research ..read more

Dr Richard Saldanha is an expert in statistical machine learning and quantitative finance. He co-heads Oxquant, a management consulting business involved in AI/ML advisory work in finance and other knowledge-based industries. Richard has worked in quantitative finance for over 23 years and has held senior roles in both asset management and investment banking at major institutions in the City of London in the areas of risk management, trading and investments. Richard holds a doctorate (DPhil) in Statistics from the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow and Chartered Statistician (CStat) of the R ..read more

The Stats + Stories podcast comes to RSS Conference 2020. Join host John Bailer for 80 minutes of debate and discussion on “the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics”. Featuring guests Tim Harford, author and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less, who will explain his “rules for thinking differently about numbers”; and Timandra Harkness, presenter, writer and comedian, who will talk about the misunderstanding of risk and the challenge of Covid-19. https://statsandstories.net ..read more

Dr Maria Van Kerkhove is an epidemiologist at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and technical lead for the Covid-19 pandemic. We spoke with Maria about how the WHO is able to best use vast amounts of data and research findings to inform guidance and some of the challenges and opportunities for the future ..read more

Emerging Threats by Royal Statistical Society ..read more

Professor Christl Donnelly, of Oxford University and Imperial College London, gave the 29th Bradford Hill Memorial Lecture on 30th June 2020 in London. We caught up with Christl to talk about her vast practical experience of applying methods in the context of infectious diseases, including SARS, MERS, Ebola and Covid-19. We discussed the real-time analysis of infectious diseases and some of the questions related to this we might ask. For instance, how many cases are there, who's getting sick and how fast is the epidemic growing? Christl explained how statistics, epidemiology and modelling can ..read more

RSS Chief Executive Stian Westlake chaired a short panel discussion on what is commonly termed the ‘A level exams fiasco’. When physical exams taking place in 2020 were cancelled in the UK because of the Covid-19 pandemic, an algorithm was developed to set students’ exam grades. However, this algorithm had to be abandoned after significant inconsistencies were identified in the results ..read more

Mags Wiley speaks to Colin Gillespie from Newcastle University about his modelling of sheep flocking ..read more

Mags Wiley speaks to Rachel Hogg about the work she does as a statistician at NHS Blood and Transplant, as part of the team looking into the reasons why mortality rates for patients on the lung transplant list are so high and how better patient care can be delivered ..read more