It’s that time of year again. The summer is still in full swing, but it’s time to get bookbags on backs and butts in seats to start the new school year. To celebrate we’re rolling out another Stats+Stories throwback episode where we are going to dip into the vault and highlight some great episodes you might have missed.

From Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel talking about new ways to teach statistics, to Helaine Alessio on problems that come to online test proctoring and finally Dashiell Young-Saver who is Texas based high school stats teacher on a mission to get students excited about the subject.

Thank you for listening and come back next week for a new episode of Stats+Stories about sports statistics and good luck to all of our academic audience members.

Dr. James Hanley is a professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His work has received several awards including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Lifetime Achievement Award.

The democratic engine of the United States relies on accurate and reliable data to function. A year-long study of the 13 federal agencies involved in U.S. data collection, including the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that the nation’s statistics are at risk. The study was produced by the American Statistical Association in partnership with George Mason University and supported by the Sloan Foundation and is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories.

Constance (Connie) Citro is a senior scholar with the Committee on National Statistics and an independent consultant in which capacity she worked on the project that produced A Nation’s Data at Risk. She was previously CNSTAT director from 2004-2017 and senior study director from 1986-2003. Citro was an American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Census Bureau research fellow and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She served as president of the Association of Public Data Users and its representative to the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, edited the Window on Washington column for Chance magazine, and served on the Advisory Committee of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. In 2018, the American Statistical Association established the Links Lecture Award in honor of Citro, Robert Groves, and Fritz Scheuren. She will give the 32nd Morris Hansen Lecture in September 2024.

Jonathan Auerbach is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at George Mason University. His research covers a wide range of topics at the intersection of statistics and public policy, including urban analytics, open data, and official statistics. His methodological interests include the analysis of longitudinal data, particularly for data science and causal inference. He is the current president of the Washington Statistical Society and the former science policy fellow at the American Statistical Association

One thing that we always value at Stat+Stories is the story of, “How did we get here?”. Today’s episode follows our colleague, from work that she did in the federal government to now leading the charge at a biocomplexity institute. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Short Stories.

Stephanie Shipp is a research professor at the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia. She co-founded and led the Social and Decision Analytics Division in 2013, starting at Virginia Tech and moving to the University of Virginia in 2018. Dr. Shipp’s work spans topics related to using all data to advance policy, the science of data science, community analytics, and innovation. She leads and engages in local, state, and federal projects to assess data quality and the ethical use of new and traditional data sources. She is leading the development of the Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) that aligns with the Census Bureau’s modernization and transformation and their Statistical Products First approach. She is a member of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics, Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) Committee, and the Professional Issues and Visibility Council. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and an American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow. She received the ASA Founder’s award in 2022.

In 2016, the Australian government launched a program it said would make tracking welfare benefits easier. Instead, it falsely told hundreds of thousands of Australians they owed the government money, with some of those individuals taking their own lives as a result. Australia's robodebt tragedy is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Noel Cressie and Dennis Trewin.

Noel Cressie is Distinguished Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Director of its Centre for Environmental Informatics, which is a vibrant interdisciplinary group doing research in spatio-temporal statistics, satellite remote sensing, and broader fields of environmental science; he is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri and Affiliate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the USA. Noel grew up in Western Australia, received a PhD from Princeton University, and shared a career between the US and Australia. He is author and co-author of four books, three of them on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, and of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. His recent research involves hunting for atmospheric-carbon-dioxide sources around the world and focusing on Antarctica’s environmental future. He has won a number of awards, including the Fisher Award and Lectureship from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), the Pitman Medal from the Statistical Society of Australia, the Barnett Award from the Royal Statistical Society, and the Matheron Award and Lecture from the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences. Noel is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and of a number of other learned societies.

Dennis Trewin is a pioneer of social statistics that are leading to meaningful measurement of social capital in Australia. He was the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 2000 and 2007, and held other senior appointments in Australia such as Electoral Commissioner and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University. Dennis is also a member of the Committee charged with responsibility for producing an independent report on the State of the Environment.

The civil war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which lasted from November 2020 to November 2022, left as many as 600 thousand people dead. The war fought by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on one side and Ethiopian and Eritrean forces on the other also had a devastating impact on the health-system in Tigray revealed using data collected by Tigray health workers and analyzed by their global health research collaborators.. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guests James J. Cochran and Mulugeta Gebregziabher.

James J. Cochran is associate dean for research with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College. He is also a professor of statistics and the Rogers-Spivey Research Fellow.

Mulugeta Gebregziabher is professor of biostatistics and vice chair for academic programmes at the Medical University of South Carolina. He is a health scientist investigator and methods core leader with the Health Equity and Rural Outreach Innovation Center of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research & Development, and director of the Region IV Public Health Training Center for South Carolina.

The views expressed in this episode only represent the opinions of Gebregziabher and Cochran and not any institutions they represent. “We acknowledge the brave efforts of the Tigray health workers and our global health research collaborators.”

Athletes around the world are preparing to live out their Olympic dreams in Paris this summer. Many of those athletes have been competing in national and world championships before participating in Olympic trials in order to join their national teams. But how can an athlete be sure they’re peaking at the right time? How can they know whether adding an additional element to a routine or changing the angle of a throw will give them an advantage over the competition? Well, there’s data for that and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Daniel Webb

Dan Webb is the Director of Performance Analytics at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) in Colorado Springs and accomplished leader in performance analytics and sports science, using innovative data science and statistical modeling methods to solve challenging performance problems. Dan has led efforts to develop and implement cutting-edge solutions to model and predict Olympic-level performance, enabling data-informed decision-making for both the USOPC and NGBs. Under Dan's leadership, the Performance Innovation department continues to provide integrated and sustained competitive advantages for Team USA by deriving insights from data to improve athlete performance and optimize training, competition, and resource allocation strategies.

Dennis Trewin is a pioneer of social statistics that are leading to meaningful measurement of social capital in Australia. He was the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics between 2000 and 2007, and held other senior appointments in Australia such as Electoral Commissioner and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University. Dennis is also a member of the Committee charged with responsibility for producing an independent report on the State of the Environment.

We leave data behind as we travel across the internet, our preferences and purchases transforming into a veritable goldmine of information for companies hoping to convince us to buy their new product or service. We often imagine this data mining and tracking as an invention of the so-called information age, but Victorians were tracking and mining data too. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Dr. James Hanley

Hanley is a professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His work has received several awards including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Lifetime Achievement Award.

When a gene in the human body goes bad, it can cause illness and disease. Scientists have been working for decades to develop therapies to address faulty genes. In the U.S. gene therapy has been approved as a treatment for illnesses such as cancer, hemophilia, AIDS. However, as researchers explore treatment possibilities. The ethics and costs of such treatments remain a concern. A new book aims to provide an overview of the state of gene therapy development which is the focus of this episode of Stat+Stories with guests Avery McIntosh and Oleksandr Sverdlov.

Dr. McIntosh is a drug developer working in rare diseases at Pfizer. He has managed teams of statisticians across study phases and in a variety of drug types and disease areas, including neurology, ophthalmology, infectious disease/ global health, hematology, and oncology. He has published peer-reviewed articles on various topics in drug development and biostatistics, including development of cell and gene therapies and qualification of digital endpoints in neurological diseases.

Dr. Sverdlov is a Neuroscience Disease Area Statistical Lead at Novartis. He has been actively involved in methodological research and applications of innovative statistical approaches in drug development. He has co-authored over forty refereed articles, edited two monographs, and co-authored a book ``Mathematical and Statistical Skills in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: A Pragmatic Approach''. His most recent work involves design and analysis of clinical trials evaluating novel digital technologies.