Program chair

The other day, Julien asked me if I wanted to run for program chair of the ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics, of which I am a member.

I thought about it for a bit and then I decided to go for it. I’m up against the incumbent Telba Irony of the FDA, clearly a formidable candidate, so it’s going to be really tough! However, on the other hand, I thought the vast majority of the things I’m currently working on is absolutely relevant for the section, so I’d really love to be elected to the post.

In the next year or so, I will be organising (or co-organising) the BayesPharma workshop and the UCL Symposium on “Contemporary Statistical Methods in Medical Research”, anyway. BayesPharma is clearly well within the remit of the section (so in a sense it’s an easy one!). But I think it would be nice to bring some Bayesian biostatistics in the symposium too.

In addition, I think it would be nice to have a bit of Bayesian health economics in the section’s interests \(-\) in fact, Chris Jackson, Richard Nixon and I are already organising a short course on Bayesian methods in health economics (based on the MRC Cambridge Biostats Unit’s course that Chris and Richard were doing and, of course, BMHE) and again, this seems to me quite relevant too!

I’ll have to write a candidate’s statement and I’ll try to post some more on this before the election. Unfortunately, however, I won’t be able to do like our beloved (?!) former prime minister did last month and organise for small airplanes to travel around the country to cheer me on…