Anita Giobbie-Hurder

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My name is Anita Giobbie-Hurder. I work as a Biostatistician for the Department of Veterans Affairs. My job combines the areas of medicine and mathematics, specifically the area of statistical design and analysis. The VA conducts a large number of clinical trials to test new medical procedures, drugs, medical devices and an assortment of medical services. It is my job as a biostat to see that these trials are designed well (so that the data will eventually tell us something), and are run properly. When a study is completed, I analyze all the data collected so that we can draw some conclusions. The trials are quite large at times, we have thousands of patients enrolled in them, and can involve many hospitals collecting data concurrently. It can be tricky keeping track of all the sites and all the data.

The studies I have worked on have varied widely in subject matter: an implantable insulin pump as a therapy for diabetes, the cost effectiveness of home based health care, the effect of intensive outpatient care upon readmission rates, the success of computer designed jaw replacement implants for patients with severe TMJ, to name a few.

After taking a course in statistics in college, I thought that this would be a fascinating field. There was something almost gamelike to be found in data analysis: take a bunch of numbers and see what they have to say about themselves. (Sometimes they tell quite a story...very much like a soap opera!) I continued my study of statistics in graduate school. Since I have always been interested in science and medicine, a career in biostat seemed to be the ideal combination.

One of the greatest things is to acquire a large dataset and just be able to play with it...to see what the relationships are between some of the variables that were collected; to see how variables are affecting one another; which quantities predict other quantities; does probability theory say that two treatments or groups are statistically different from one another. The list of questions, and possible answers goes on and on.

As a kid, I didn't know anything about statistics, but I did love math and science and took all the courses that I could to inform myself as much as possible. It is also a "must" to know your way around a computer...experimental design and especially data analysis demand the assistance of computers.

I have had several fine teachers in college, grad school and beyond, that made this field exciting by bringing to the classroom a wealth of information and lots of applications to discuss and have us work on. I can remember analyzing a data set concerning how to cook donuts...as well as looking at the first Vietnam war draft lottery to discover that the results were not random. The data can be pure fun...or quite serious.

When students think of statistics, they often think of a field that is dry and lifeless. I enjoy visiting older grammar school as well as junior high students to share my field with them. It doesn't take long for them to see the wide reaching influence of statistics upon our daily lives. We might look at the outcomes of clinical trials that resulted in successful polio vaccines, as well as the errors in data analysis that contributed to the Challenger disaster. We might look at different strategies to sample groups of people and discuss how this might be a concern for folks planning the next census. We often end the class conducting a blinded taste test of soft drinks and doing some preliminary data analysis. I consider my day a success if I hear some of the kids excited about what they just heard (and discussed).

If you think that biostatistics might be an interesting career choice, I would suggest preparing yourself by studying as much mathematics and science that you can. As one of my grad professors said, in order to do a great job analyzing data, you had to first become a mini-expert in the field from which the data were taken.

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