TSHS 2022 Outgoing Chair Message

2022 Outgoing Chair Message by Jacqui Hicks, PhD, Boston University.

Greetings from the outgoing TSHS Section chair! I would like to welcome our incoming Section chair, Maria Ciarleglio, and share some of the activities that we have been involved in during 2022.

New Members of the Executive Committee

We expanded the TSHS Executive Committee and have many new members. I would like to welcome Melinda Higgins, our 2022 Chair Elect – future 2024 Chair; Usha Govindarajulu, our 2022 Program Chair Elect – future 2024 Program Chair; Charlotte Bolch, our Blog Editor; Jim Dignam and Mingzhao Hu, our Resource Review co-Editors; and Darsy Darssan, our Webinar Coordinator.

I would like to thank our outgoing Past Chair, Ann Brearley, for her outstanding leadership. In addition, I would like to thank Bob Oster who stepped down as Treasurer in December 2022 after 20 years of service to TSHS!

JSM 2022

It was great to see so many of you in person at the Joint Statistics Meetings in August 2022 after two years of virtual meetings.

On Monday morning we sponsored an invited session on “Teaching Social Justice Through Statistics and Biostatistics: The Case for a DEI-Infused Curriculum”, organized by Rongwei (Rochelle) Fu (Oregon Health & Science University) and chaired by Byung Park (Oregon Health & Science University). On Monday afternoon Alexia Iasonos (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) led a roundtable discussion on “The Statistician as an Investigator and Educator, Not Just a Power Calculator, on Clinical Research Protocols”.

On Tuesday afternoon Hoang Thanh Nguyen (University of Texas Medical Branch) led a roundtable session on “Innovative Approaches to Teaching Statistics to Millennials and Gen Z”. We also had Brandon George (Thomas Jefferson University) chair a contributed paper session titled “Teaching Statistics and Data Ethics in the Health Sciences”.

On Wednesday we hosted an invited panel session which was organized by Ann Brearley (University of Minnesota) and chaired by Amy Z Nowacki (Cleveland Clinic) on “Teaching in the Health Sciences: Is There a Viable Teaching Career Pathway”.

Thank you to all the organizers, chairs and speakers, and a particular thank you to the 2022 program chair, Brandon George (Thomas Jefferson), and 2023 program chair, Amanda Ellis (University of Kentucky) for putting together these excellent sessions!!

Awards

We were happy to be able to celebrate the accomplishments of our members at our annual meeting and mixer. This year’s winners of TSHS section awards were:

· Outstanding Teaching Award: Tom Braun, University of Michigan

· Young Investigator Award: Amanda Ellis, University of Kentucky

· Distinguished Achievement Award: Scott Evans, George Washington University

In addition, the best presentation award from JSM 2022 was awarded after the meeting was over to Ashley Petersen from the University of Minnesota for her presentation “What Got You Here Won't Get You There: Building Students' Intuition About Correlated Data”.

Thank you to all those who volunteered to review the presentations and work the TSHS booth this year and congratulations to all of our award winners!!!

Webinar

This year the webinars committee arranged a webinar featuring the work in education in statistics curriculum by Dr. Amanda Ellis titled “Methods for Introducing the Future Public Health Workforce to Data Analysis”. You can find the recordings for all of our past webinars on our section webpage, or on our section's YouTube channel.

Additional Resources for Teaching

In addition to the above, the TSHS Section offers other resources 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. 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. And 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, at cbigelow@schoolph.umass.edu.

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 co-editors, Jim Dignam at jdignam@bsd.uchicago.edu and Mingzhao Hu at mhu@pstat.ucsb.edu.

Community Forum: The TSHS community forum on the ASA’s website (members only) is a great way to share ideas, ask questions, or look for ideas or collaborators.

Getting Involved

As the past Section chair, my duties this year will include leading the Nominations Committee. If you are interested in getting more involved with our section, please let me know! It is a great way to get to know other people with similar interests across the country, and it is a lot of fun too. We are currently looking for people to get involved on the Career Development committee. If you have an interest in career-related issues such as getting promoted as teaching faculty, writing external letters, career tracks for non-tenure-track faculty, or mentoring, consider getting involved with this committee. If you are interested, please reach out to our Career Development Chair, Ada Youk at ayouk@pitt.edu. In conclusion, thank you to all the Executive Committee members who contribute so much to keeping the section active and useful, and thank you to all Section members who have contributed in so many ways as well.

I look forward to seeing many of you in Toronto for JSM 2023 in August!

Jacqui Hicks