Student SPHere 2008-09

Spring is finally sprung here, which is buoying my mood for the end of the semester. One great advantage to the warmer temps is that I am back on my bike, after a very wet and cold winter. Last weekend, I biked to the U Rec Center to try out a Zumba class with my friend Julia. What an energizing, fun workout! Although the U's rec center is a fantastic resource, I don't actually use it (this was my second visit in my 4 years here!), preferring to do my sweating in the privacy of my living room. However, this class was a great chance to "try before you buy," as they say. I'm definitely getting the DVDs now.

It's hard to believe that just a week and a half ago, I was trudging through a snow storm in Sioux Falls, SD! We were visiting to celebrate Tom's mom's birthday. All three of our nephews were there, which made for ready entertainment. The twins are so fun and we had a great time with the whole family. We even took in some theater, watching his cousin play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at the local high school.

The big news around Biostats lately has been the public phase of our search for a division head. Three candidates have been invited, each giving a public lecture and having tons of meetings with faculty, students, staff, and administrators. My own adviser, Brad Carlin, is one candidate, so I am obviously a little biased. It has been so interesting to see the different approaches that each brings. I attended all of their public talks and was fortunate enough to have lunch with Dr. Dalene Stangl from Duke, as well. Though the decision is ultimately made by Dean Finnegan, the whole process is remarkably inclusive. The faculty have their say at a big meeting with the Dean, and even students are encouraged to submit feedback on the candidates to the search committee.

On the research front, I am looking forward to the re-submission of yet another paper from the work I did with Simon Rosser's group in Epi. We wrote up a little paper on the recruitment strategies used to obtain a sample of folks who are typically underrepresented in epidemiological studies. Our target population was primarily HIV-positive men of color who have sex with men-- not exactly an easy group to enroll. The paper describes the differences in recruitment effectiveness in terms of HIV status and race/ethnicity, as well as figures on retention and the costs of various recruitment methods. My favorite part of the revision was making new figures. We weren't doing any modeling in this paper, instead presenting descriptive statistics and a few Chi-square tests. Thus, my major contribution as an analyst was deciding how to convey the data clearly. I tried about a dozen ways of displaying the data, finally finding inspiration on one of my favorite blogs, Junk Charts. The authors find many examples of truly awful charts in the mainstream media. This post, in contrast, gave kudos for a set of great plots from the New York Times, which I emulated.

I'm trying not to think too much about how little time is left in the semester. I am thankful not to have final exams, and have been able to get a bit of a start on one of my final projects. If I can keep my research going at the same time, the next few weeks will be really productive!