Congratulations to SSA members Dr Susanna Cramb and Dr Margarita Moreno-Betancur, who were amongst those awarded National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Grants. The announcement was made on Tuesday by Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt. Investigator Grants consolidate separate fellowship and research support into one grant scheme that provides the highest-performing researchers at all career stages with funding for their salary (if required) and a significant research support package. These grants provide the investigator with flexibility to pursue important new research directions as they arise and to form collaborations as needed, rather than being restricted to the scope of a specific research project.

Dr Susanna Cramb of the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Faculty of Health received funding for the research project PLACE (Prioritising Location-based Analysis and Consumer Engagement) for Change. This research uniquely incorporates both complex spatial analyses and lived consumer experience to identify priority areas and propose actionable solutions to help reduce health inequities for cancer, diabetes and injuries. Location plays a key role in Australia’s health inequities yet is usually ignored or aggregated to large regions. This hinders identifying appropriate, localised solutions.

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute’s (MCRI) Dr Margarita Moreno-Betancur’s project will tackle “big data” problems in longitudinal studies by developing new statistical methods for analysing pathways to disease. “Existing tools simply do not work in data-intensive studies such as those using large-scale biomarker datasets or real-time measurements in clinical care,” she said. “I’m aiming to address this critical gap through an integrated research program that will develop solutions, including dissemination to health researchers, as well as advanced capacity in the critical discipline of biostatistics.”

Both recipients received funding support through SSA’s Fellowship Funding initiative. 

Western Australia’s SSA August branch meeting took on something of a festive air in what looks set to become an annual event – a special joint meeting with the Australasian Region of the International Biometrics Society. The presentation by A/Prof Nicola Armstrong from Curtin University provided an interesting introduction to the topic of epigenetic clocks. The title of her talk was “Investigating Epigenetic Clocks”. These clocks estimate “biological” age from blood or other tissues by measuring modifications to the epigenome, such as levels of DNA methylation (the accumulation of methyl groups to DNA molecules), that occur as a direct consequence of ageing.

Nicola described the basic modelling process that underpins the construction of such epigenetic clocks, being built via a penalized regression such as lasso or elastic net to identify a sparse set of predictive CpGs from the hundreds of thousands of potential methylation sites that are probed. With the supervised learning algorithms trained against chronological age, markers of biological age are derived from observed methylation levels at the final set of predictive sites. Measures of age acceleration/deceleration are then used to assess if underlying tissue ages faster or slower than expected.  For illustration, two popular clocks were applied to three different datasets of elderly cohorts, and results from studies assessing disease-induced tissue degeneration were also presented.   Several issues arising in application of these methods were discussed. These included the impact on performance of missing probes and pre-processing methods, variation arising from use of different platforms, and dependence of biological interpretation on the sample characteristics of the training data set used. A final word of caution regarding model interpretation noted there are inherent limitations in making personal predictions.

The evening drew a good crowd, and the host of questions and lively discussion at its conclusion demonstrated that attendees found the talk interesting and engaging!

Bethy McKinnon

On Tuesday 13^th April, 2021, the Western Australian branch was pleased to have Professor Luke Prendergast to present at the monthly branch meeting. The title of his talk was “Meta-analysis: common traps and misconceptions”.

Luke is Associate Head of School, School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Statistics Consulting Platform at La Trobe University. He has worked on Meta-Analysis for the past 6 years in his career. He gave a talk on certain flaws and misconceptions in meta-analysis and provided recommendations on how these flaws could be overcome using examples from published research. He mentioned that some of the flaws may be due to researchers lacking adequate training in meta-analysis.

Using the published examples, Luke identified problems and confusion from authors on whether to use random effects or fixed effects models in meta-analysis. He proposed that random effects models would be appropriate to use, which assumes heterogeneity between the studies. In addition, analysts should avoid allocating very large weights to a small number studies which may bias the results of the analysis and which may happen with fixed effect are used. Another problem relates to the interpretation of the meta-analysis results. Simple tests may lack power, especially when the number of studies is small. Authors should make it clear that the tests are for a mean effect and not effects overall. Prediction intervals which take into account the variance in the estimators and the variance associated with heterogeneity are one good example of how the magnitude of heterogeneity can be assessed. If there are wide prediction and confidence intervals in random effects models, this is to account for the heterogeneity among the studies.

The key message was that “Heterogeneity in studies can be a good thing”. Heterogeneity may be very interesting and may lead to new research directions. He further responded to questions from the audience and recommended that researchers should look for additional information on studies included in the meta-analysis to explain the analysis and conduct sensitivity analysis as appropriate.

Fadzai Chikwava

One of STA’s greatest strengths is the breadth and diversity of our membership. While other policy and advocacy organisations represent segments of this sector, the STA community’s unique role and reach enables us to bring together a combined STEM sector view. This breadth and our role as the key connector for the STEM sector has been powerfully in evidence in recent months.

One of the issues of greatest concern across the sector is the continuing toll of this pandemic on jobs and job security. Next month, Science & Technology Australia and Professional Scientists Australia will release the 2021 results from our annual workplace survey of scientists’ working conditions. In member catch-ups, we’ve heard further examples of closures and cuts in STEM departments and disciplines. We are gathering these examples to highlight these issues further as part of our advocacy around the release of the survey. Please get in touch if you have further examples you can share - especially if they could be referenced in our media pitching for the survey release.

We’re also supporting and coordinating with member organisations providing input to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure roadmap process. And we continue to engage over the Australian Research Council policies on pre-print citations. Yesterday the Audit Office also released its report on the Medical Research Future Fund. We were pleased to see the Department of Health agreed to implement all of the report’s recommendations. STA’s submission on further steps to improve MRFF transparency are here - we will continue to advocate for them.

The diversity and breadth of our membership is also crucial in STA’s governance. Nominations have opened for election for three roles on our Board - covering Aquatic Sciences, Medical and Cognitive Sciences, and General Sciences. Nominations also open today for Executive Committee roles. We strongly encourage candidates from a wide diversity of demographics and disciplines to nominate. In particular, noting our commitments under our Reconciliation Action Plan, we especially encourage nominations from First Nations people in STEM. Here’s how to nominate.

A final call for you to send superb candidates our way for STA’s influential Director of Policy and Engagement. Applications close on Monday at 10am AEST - so please encourage any truly outstanding people in your networks to apply.

Until next time, 

Misha Schubert 
CEO, Science & Technology Australia 

The Early Career & Student Statisticians Conference 2021 (ECSSC 2021) was an enjoyable and memorable experience for me. The event took place virtually for the first time ever due to the pandemic and it was the first statistics conference I attended since I became a PhD student early this year. At the conference I met some passionate young statistics researchers and learnt a lot throughout the whole event.

A large varieties of topics were discussed from the presenters in the fields of Data Science, Biostatistics and Economics, for instance. Lots of PhD students and early career researchers showed their fantastic work and this gave me some ideas to try for improving my own projects which I would have never thought of before! All the posters were well designed and had a high level of detail.

The keynote presentations were instructive and useful. I enjoyed the one by Prof. Tran from USYD the most. He gave a clear comparison between Variational Bayes (VB) and MCMC approaches, and explained why he thinks VB can be preferred to MCMC in certain situations. The career panel sharpened my view about what statisticians can do in the future and described career pathways alternative to academia.

I would like to thank the Statistical Society of Australia and all the sponsors for organising ECSSC 2021. Despite the fact that the event took place online, some social events such as the Trivia Night and Bingo still ran and were successful. The organisers definitely put a lot of effort in the organising and I would like to express my deepest gratitude to SSA for sponsoring my attendance at ECSSC 2021.

Hanwen Xuan

Many of us in the New South Wales branch will remember the winter of 2021 for being locked down due to a stubborn COVID-19 Delta variant outbreak. As of late August, the lockdown was still in place and the August branch meeting was carried out totally using the Zoom tele-meeting application. We have some bright spots: spring is around the corner and accelerating vaccination rates are pointing to gradual returns to normality. Another bright spot was a pandemic-era seminar by Dr Nancy Briggs, who is a manager and senior statistical consultant at Stats Central, University of New South Wales. Around 30 people signed in for the event.

A major theme throughout the talk was the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with how it has changed where we work, how we work and the kind of work that we can do. Statistical issues concerning, for example, conclusions in a COVID-19 world compared with those pre-pandemic were discussed.

A running example throughout the talk concerned a randomised clinical trial on parenting of children aged between 14 and 24 months. The trial had three treatment arms: parent-child interaction therapy-toddler, circle of security-parenting and waitlist control. Some of the outcomes were parenting sensitivity and stress. The writer of this article was pleased to see that generalised linear mixed models played a central role in the analyses. The study was designed before anyone knew that a pandemic was about to occur, but the analyses were carried out in the early 2020s. After it was clear that the pandemic was having a big effect on the many randomised clinical trials going on, authors Cro et al. published a 2020 paper titled "A four-step strategy for handling missing outcome data in randomised trials affected by a pandemic". Speaker Briggs told us that she found this paper very useful for her recent research. One issue was whether data, missing or observed, should be treated differently depending on whether participants are directly affected by COVID-19 (either by infection or changes in treatment). Pandemic-related papers by Degtyarev et al. (2020) and Meyer et al.(2020) were also mentioned.

The main body of the talk was a detailed look at the toddler parenting randomised clinical trial by following the four steps recommended by Cro et al. (2020), as well as advice in Degtyarev et al. (2020) and Meyer et al. (2020). These latter papers recommend that, for trials that started pre-COVID-19, a pandemic-free estimand be chosen since this is what the trial was established to do. The Cro et al. Step 2 is "Establish what data are missing for the chosen estimand". For the toddler parenting clinical trial Nancy explained that there are missing data due to ceasing data collection. An example of a recommendations from these references is to summarise study population characteristics before and after pandemic onset.

Even though we are all looking forward to getting this pandemic behind us, it was interesting to see how it is impacting applied statistics.

Matt Wand University of Technology Sydney 

The Early Career & Student Statisticians Conference (ECSSC) 2021 was held online over 26^th July-1^st August. As an early career quantitative researcher at Monash Rural Health, Bendigo, I was excited to hear about ECSSC 2021 and to receive funding from SSA Vic to attend. This conference provided me with opportunities to share my pharmacoepidemiological research, refine my presentation skills, meet and interact with fellow ECSSs, and learn about multifarious topics from inspiring keynote speakers and ECSSs. Topics of particular interest to me included causal inference, multicentre trials, psychometrics, spatial modelling, social media analytics, consulting, communication, and the sociology of statistical expertise.

From my perspective, while I enjoyed and learned from the relatively specialised, technical topics covered at ECSSC 2021, I feel that I personally derived greater benefit from the more human-centred presentations. This includes presentations emphasising qualitative approaches and the personal narratives of statisticians, as exemplified by:

• Atousa Ghahramani’s poster presentation ‘Use of social media analytics for raising awareness of cardiovascular diseases risk factors in the female population of Australia’ (a mixed methods study)
• Taya Collyer’s oral presentation ‘What is statistical expertise?’ (a qualitative study)
• Cameron Patrick’s oral presentation ‘Tales from the trenches of statistical consulting: five tips for early career statistical consultants’
• Sharm Thuraisingam’s oral presentation ‘Surviving a PhD with a toddler during a pandemic’.

It was also helpful to hear the personal experiences and insights conveyed through panels and information sessions, including the experiences shared by my fellow Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia (BCA) alumni during the BCA information session. I agree with this sentiment expressed by one of the delegates: all statisticians are statistical consultants, be it informally or formally. I found it refreshing to attend a statistics conference with such a strong emphasis on the human side of the profession. The human side of statistical practice is rarely formally taught in statistics courses yet, in my experience and opinion, is of paramount importance to us statisticians and our collaborators.

I thought that technology was employed to great effect by the ECSSC 2021 Committee. The use of a solitary Zoom link for all presentations, panels, information sessions, and social events simplified attendance from an end-user perspective. Breakout rooms were well utilised during social sessions to encourage interaction and networking among delegates. The Zoom sessions were complemented by the conference’s Slack workspace—a dedicated online communication platform for conference updates, reminders, Q&As, comments, and conversations. As a first-time Slack user, I was impressed by the user-friendliness and effectiveness of this software solution. Slack facilitated many fruitful conversations about varied topics while providing a place for delegates to share helpful resources and information, such as statistics-related videos and the Twitter handles of statisticians who regularly tweet (including advanced R users). Furthermore, thanks to the sharing of recorded presentations through the ‘post-conference’ Slack channel and electronic posters through an online exhibition, my fellow delegates and I have been able to revisit particular presentations or view any that we may have missed. The ECSSC 2021 YouTube video competition was a terrific accompaniment to ECSSC 2021, further exemplifying the conference’s effective use of technology.

Overall, I found attending ECSSC 2021 to be an informative, interesting, and inspiring experience. I offer my congratulations and thanks to the ECSSC 2021 Committee as well as all conference presenters and attendees. In a contemporary world full of so much uncertainty, I feel confident about the bright future of statistics—and statistics conferences—in Australia.

Dr Michael Leach
Senior Lecturer (Education and Research)
Rural Health, Monash University

The IBS Travel Awards Program (hooray, travel!) will launch its pre-International Biometric Conference travel funding campaign very soon. More information may be found here.   Those who reside in lower and middle-income countries may apply. Funding of up to $3,000 USD per applicant is to be used to attend the 2022 International Biometric Conference in Riga, Latvia, taking place from July 10-15 at the Radisson Blu Hotel and Conference Center.

Related to the conference, there is no membership requirement to join the new IBC online Community, which was recently launched . Obviously, those eventually planning to attend the 2022 IBC will find this more useful than others. Updates related to local travel restrictions and much more will be posted there, as well as full session information.

And speaking of sessions, just a reminder that submissions from a broad range of perspectives are encouraged during our IBC Call for Contributed Sessions. Click here to view an list of the methodological topics and application areas that have been covered at previous conferences and which likely will also be covered at the next conference. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

Submissions for oral presentations and poster sessions must be submitted online through the ScholarOne abstract portal, and will be accepted through 30 September 2021. Click here to get started.

And finally, it might be helpful to know that new rates for online advertising have just been posted online. Click here to view them:.

As always, we are happy to answer any questions you have at ibs@biometricsociety.org. Thanks for your interest!

Peter E Doherty, CAE

Executive Director