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The
San Diego chapter hosted its first one-day conference on February 27,
2004 at the Center for Molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine, the
University of California San Diego in La Jolla, California. The theme
of this conference was “Current Research Applications of Statistical
Methodologies”. The conference brought together statisticians and
statistically oriented professionals from academia, industry, government
and research institutions to share their ideas and results of theoretical
and applied projects in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. The conference
attracted 75 attendees from San Diego and Los Angeles area as well with
fourteen oral presentations and five poster presentations. Amongst the
presenters were a psychologist, an economist and a fish biologist.
Dr. Nancy Lo, the chapter President, opened the program welcoming everyone
with a special thanks to the ASA Chapter Visitation Program for providing
the travel funding required to bring the keynote speaker, Dr. Bob Mason
of Southwest Research Institute of Texas and the immediate past president
of the ASA, to Southern California. She also took the opportunity to give
a brief business report and historical account of the chapter.
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From
the left: Sheela Talwalker, Cleridy Lennert, Nancy Lo,
Robert Mason, and Robert Rifffenburgh
A
scene at the conference
From
the left: Cleridy Lennert, Nancy Lo, Kevin Cummins,
Sheela Talwalker, Gerald Cirricione, and Christopher Ake
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Even
before the conference officially began that morning, Bob set the tone
of the day by taking the time to encourage a free flowing exchange of
ideas with the attendees during morning coffee. He, along with subsequent
speakers, continued these efforts in their presentations throughout the
day. In particular, Bob, in his keynote speech, provided an interesting
account of a series of statistical experiments conducted to determine
whether honeybees could successfully be used to detect landmines. He also
shared experiences on his involvement with AP Statistics courses taught
in high schools and encouraged members to pursue similar activities.
After the keynote address, the morning session continued with presentations
on a variety of issues pertaining to testing of hypotheses in the areas
of bioassay, genetics, and survival analysis. Included in these was a
preliminary report of an interesting extension of the Kaplan-Meier estimator
for time varying covariates. Lunch time afforded the attendees time to
browse through the posters. The event continued with two afternoon sessions,
one pertaining to the applications of statistics in clinical trials and
the other to the applications of survey sampling to health and market
research, and a presentation on the use of Bayesian statistics in fisheries
stock assessments. Included in these was a discussion of a design, and
the challenges of its subsequent analysis, of a clinical trial using equipoise
stratified randomization whereby schizophrenic patients enrolled in the
study would have the option of being randomized to any two or three or
all four comparative treatments.
In addition to the support from the ASA Chapter Visitation Program, this
conference would not have been made possible without the diligent effort
of its conference committee members. Thanks also go to the Southwest Fisheries
Science Center, NOAA, for providing clerical assistance and audiovisual
equipment.
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