Greetings from our 2022 Chair

I look forward to working with everyone this year and hope to see many of you at JSM this year (hopefully in person!). This is an exciting time for the Section on the Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences! We have been working on many initiatives for our members including online webinars, planning the JSM program, nominating ASA fellows and giving out section awards. The TSHS Section offers many resources and events to help you in your teaching! Check these out:

Datasets: The TSHS Resources Portal provides open-access, peer-reviewed health sciences-related datasets specifically intended for teaching. There are currently thirteen (13) datasets available. Each dataset is available in several formats, and is accompanied by an introduction, a data dictionary, and the citation for the original study publication. If you need datasets for teaching, check out the Portal. If you have datasets that you would be able to share, please consider submitting them to the Portal for review. Contact our Portal co-director, Carol Bigelow, here.

Webinars: The TSHS section sponsors webinars roughly quarterly. The most recent webinar on November 17, 2021 was led by Dr. Phillip M. Sedgwick of St. George’s University of London who gave a talk titled “Trials and Tribulations of Teaching NHST in the Health Sciences” on the challenges of teaching null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). The webinars are recorded and freely available at our section’s website. If you have an idea for a future webinar, we’d love to hear it. Please contact me here.

Blog: The TSHS section blog contains a wealth of ideas about teaching. Check out the book reviews, the #ReadyResources, or the webinar recaps, to name a few. If you have ideas about teaching that you would like to share with others, consider writing a blog post! Contact our blog editor, John Doucette, here.

JSM 2022: Our program committee has been working hard to arrange excellent sessions for JSM 2022. We have two invited sessions: “Teaching Social Justice through Statistics and Biostatistics- the Case for a DEI-Infused Curriculum” organized by Rongwei (Rochelle) Fu, and “Teaching in the Health Sciences: Is there a Viable Teaching Career Pathway?” organized by Ann M Brearley. We hope you will join us in August. For more information, visit JSM 2022.

-Jacqueline Milton Hicks

Section Chair, 2022