Biostatistics testimonials

Warinthon Baker

Warinthon worked with Dr Ari Samaranayaka as a supervisor on her Master of Public Health thesis.

"When I develop research proposal for my MPH at the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, my primary supervisor Professor Sarah Derrett and me realised it involved a significant quantitative component. Therefore we wanted to have a biostatistician as one of my co-supervisors even though I already had completed related university statistics papers as part of my DPH. Accordingly Professor Derrett was able to convince Dr Ari Samaranayaka at the Centre for Biostatistics to be in my supervisory team.

"Since then I received a fantastic support from Dr Ari; his guidance was invaluable in every step of the process including planning the statistical analysis and writing up the Analysis section.  I am deeply grateful towards Dr Ari for his patience and support through the analysis process which was the most difficult and time-consuming part for me.

"His involvement and guidance did not limit to those two areas, he helped me throughout my thesis from development of research protocol to the end of the thesis examination. Now I understand the advantages of having biostatistical guidance from the start of the study design stage rather than delaying it to later stages.

"The overall experience of my journey was enlightening and strengthened my confidence not only as a student / researcher / writer but also as a biostatistician.

"My supervisors were flexible enough to understand my other commitments as I was a health professional working part-time while doing the thesis.

"Superb guidance from my wonderful supervisory team prepared me to be fortunate enough to graduate with a distinction, and to publish a first-author paper in a reputed international journal.

"Writing one's first journal article is a big step for any postgraduate even more so when you're dealing with large statistical data sets in a quantitative study.

"I encourage students or anyone who is doing quantitative research to have a biostatistician from the Centre for Biostatistics in the study team starting from the study design stage as opposed to waiting till the end of data collection."

Robin Turner

On the 4th and 5th of December Director Robin Turner presented the Introductory Biostatistics for Clinical Researchers Course.

Here are some testimonials from the participants:

• 'I feel more confident in interpreting literature and understand our power calculations better. I am actually excited to work with my data now, as statistics is not that 'scary''.
• 'Very well planned. Especially loved the M&Ms & activity where a statistician sat with us. Robin was an excellent teacher. These are things that I have been taught numerous times over the past FIFTEEN YEARS but never fully 'got' before. Thanks '.
• 'The course is really good for early researchers enabling them to fresh up the fundamentals in Biostatistics'.

The evaluation forms are anonymous. The quotes are in response to the final question on the evaluation form (6) Do you give permission for your answers to be used in future promotional material for this course? If yes, how would you summarise the benefits of this course in 25 words or less?).