- Posted By: Usama Ali
The RSS Young Statisticians Meeting is an annual conference for early-career statisticians. The 2017 Meeting, held at Keele University on 27th-28th July, was an opportunity for early-career statisticians to exhibit their work, discuss ideas, and network in a friendly and encouraging environment. Attendees included students, academic researchers, and professional statisticians from the Office for National Statistics.
There were a mixture of delegate presentations, plenary sessions and poster sessions. The conference began with a brilliant talk by Professor Ian McHale from the University of Salford regarding his work on statistics in sport, and he gave several examples of how statistics is used in sport in general, and in the football leagues in particular, for example when a club wants to purchase a new player, they use statisticians to help decide if they are making a good choice in spending tens of millions of pounds.
Other plenary sessions were delivered over the 2 days by Professor Julius Sim (Keele) on Visualising Data, Dr Gary Brown (Office for National Statistics) on government statistics and Dr Aimee Gott (Mango Solutions) on her career from statistician to data scientist.
The 20+ delegate presentations were extremely interesting and diverse with 5 themed sessions taking place over the 2 days; (1) statistical methods and theory I, (2) meta-analysis, (3) public health & sector, (4) clinical trials, epidemiology and genetics, and (5) statistical methods and theory II.
In the third session, I presented some of our work on falls prevention with a talk titled: “Do nursing stations within bays of hospital wards reduce the rate of inpatient falls? – An interrupted time series analysis”. It was very well received by the attendees and provoked a lot of interest in discussions after.
The conference closed with prizes for best oral presentation and best poster. I won the prize for best oral presentation and as part of my prize, I have the opportunity to present our work at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Annual International Conference in Glasgow this September. The RSS is a professional body for statisticians and data analysts that advocates for the key role of statistics and data in society. It works to ensure that policy formulation and decision-making are informed by evidence for the public good.