Postdoctoral fellow position in reproducible research

We are looking to recruit a postdoctoral fellow to work on developing tools to make scientific research more easily reproducible. We’re looking for someone who wants to work on (and solve!) real research problems in the biomedical sciences and address the growing need for reproducible research tools. The position would be in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and would be jointly advised by Jeff and myself.

Qualifications: PhD in statistics, biostatistics, computer science, or related field; strong programming skills in R and Perl/Python/C; excellent written and oral communication skills; serious moxie

Additional Information: Informal questions about the position can be sent to Dr. Roger Peng at rpeng @ jhsph.edu. Applications will be considered as they arrive.

Here's my #ENAR2013 Wednesday schedule

Here are my picks for ENAR sessions today (Wednesday):

• 8:30-10:15am: Large Data Visualization and Exploration, Grand Ballroom 4 (make sure you stay till the end to see Karl Broman); Innovative Methods in Causal Inference with Applications to Mediation, Neuroimaging, and Infectious Diseases, Grand Ballroom 8A; Next Generation Sequencing, Grand Ballroom 5
• 10:30am-12:15pm: Statistical Information Integration of -Omics Data, Grand Ballrooms 1 & 2

Okay, so this schedule actually requires me to split myself in to three separate entities. However, if you find a way to do that, the 8:30-10:15am block is full of good stuff.

Have fun!

If I were at #ENAR2013 today, here's where I'd go

This week is the annual ENAR meeting, the big biostatistics conference, in Orlando, Florida. It actually started on Sunday but I haven’t gotten around to looking at the program (obviously, I’m not there right now). Flipping through the program now, here’s what looks good to me for Tuesday:

• 8:30-10:15am: Functional Neuroimaging Decompositions, Grand Ballroom 3 
• 10:30am-12:15pm: Hmm…I guess you should go to the Presidential Invited Address, Grand Ballroom 7
• 1:45-3:30pm: JABES Showcase, Grand Ballroom 8A; Statistical Body Language: Analytical Methods for Wearable Computing, Grand Ballroom 4
• 3:45-5:30pm: Big Data: Wearable Computing, Crowdsourcing, Space Telescopes, and Brain Imaging, Grand Ballroom 8A; Sample Size Planning for Clinical Development, Grand Ballroom 6

That’s right, you can pack in two sessions on wearable computing today if you want. I’ll post tomorrow for what looks good on Wednesday.

Sunday data/statistics link roundup (3/10/13)

1. This is an outstanding follow up analysis to our paper on the rate of false discoveries in the medical literature. I hope that the author of the blog post will consider submitting it for publication in a journal, I think it is worth having more methodology out there in this area. 
2. If you are an academic in statistics and aren’t following Karl and Thomas on Twitter, you should be. Also check out Karl’s (mostly) reproducible paper.
3. An article in the WSJ that I think I received about 40 times this week. The online version has a quote from our own B-Caffo. It is a really good read. If you are into this, it seems like the interviews with Rebecca Nugent (where we discuss growing undergrad programs) and Joe Blitzstein where we discuss stats ed are relevant. I thought this quote was hugely relevant, “The bulk of the people coming out [with statistics degrees] are technically competent but they’re missing the consultative and the soft skills, everything else they need to be successful” We are focusing heavily on both components of these skills in the grad program here at Hopkins - so if people are looking for awesome data people, just let us know!
4. A cool discussion of how the A’s look for players with “positive residuals” - positive value missed by the evaluations of other teams. (via Rafa)
5. The physicist and the bikini model. If you haven’t read it, you must be living under a rock. (via Alex N.)
6. An interesting article about how IBM is using Watson to come up with new recipes based on the data from old recipes. I’m a little suspicious of the Spanish crescent though - no butter?!
7. You should vote for Steven Salzberg for the Ben Franklin award. The dude has come up huge for open software and we should come up huge for him. Gotta vote today though.
8. The Harlem Shake has killed more than one of my lunch hours. But this one is the best. By far. How all simulation studies should be done (via StatsChat).

Send me student/postdoc blogs in statistics and computational biology

I’ve been writing a blog for a few years now, but it started after I was already comfortably settled in a tenure track job. There have been some huge benefits of writing a scientific blog. It has certainly raised my visibility and given me opportunities to talk about issues that are a little outside of my usual research agenda. It has also inspired more than one research project that has ended up in a full blown peer-reviewed publication. I also frequently look to blogs/twitter accounts to see “what’s happening” in the world of statistics/data science.

One thing that gets me incredibly fired up are student blogs. A [I’ve been writing a blog for a few years now, but it started after I was already comfortably settled in a tenure track job. There have been some huge benefits of writing a scientific blog. It has certainly raised my visibility and given me opportunities to talk about issues that are a little outside of my usual research agenda. It has also inspired more than one research project that has ended up in a full blown peer-reviewed publication. I also frequently look to blogs/twitter accounts to see “what’s happening” in the world of statistics/data science.

One thing that gets me incredibly fired up are student blogs. A](http://hilaryparker.com/) of my students have them and I read them whenever they post. But I have found it is hard to discover all of the blogs that might be written by students I’m not directly working with.

So this post is designed for two things:

(1) I’d really like it if you could please send me the links to twitter feeds/blogs/google+ pages etc. of students (undergrad, grad or postdoc) in statistics, computational biology, computational neuroscience, computational social science, etc. Anything that touches statistics and data is fair game.

(2) I plan to create a regularly-maintained page on the blog with links to student blogs  with some kind of tagging system so other people can find all the cool stuff that students are thinking about/doing.

Please feel free to either post links in the comments, send them to us on twitter, or email them to me directly. I’ll follow up in a couple of weeks once I have things organized.