Jonathan Shtaynberger: The Beauty of Biostatistics

With Commencement days away, members of the Class of 2015 reflect on their time as Mailman School students and share their plans for the future.

Numbers are only part of the story, says Biostatistics student Jonathan Shtaynberger. His favorite class was also the source of his lowest grade. Why the positive experience? His professor made him realize that data interpretation was paramount. As he embarks on job as a biostatistician for a contract research organization, Shtaynberger reflects that biostatistics takes a human touch:

In the future, more and more people will be statistically literate. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Sure, there will be greater appreciation for why data are essential for reaching informed conclusions. But what worries me is that they may think that they don’t need us biostatisticians anymore. Not true.

I’ll draw an analogy. My cooking skills are adequate: I make a mean mac n’ cheese, but you probably shouldn’t hire me to cater your wedding. In the same sense, biostatisticians are critical to the research process because they have a more comprehensive and multi-faceted understanding of the data and their limitations, than someone who took Stat 101 and knows how to do regression. It’s essential to have a lot of different statistical approaches at your disposal, in order to most effectively work on the problem at hand.

That’s one of the things that most impressed me about Mailman. In my classes, professors emphasized that it’s not enough to perform an analysis. We need to be able to explain the clinical significance and the impact of our results. There is a clear focus on trying to answer the question “what can we learn from this?”

I selected Mailman because it has a strong public health program and a renowned biostatistics department. Also, because its location in New York would allow me to live rent-free in my family home in Brooklyn.

My favorite class, which was also the most challenging and the source of my lowest grade, was Generalized Linear Models. The instructor, Professor Xinhua Liu, had high expectations and gave us a lot of work. But she also had an open-door policy, and would sit with me for a half-hour, anytime, no matter what she was doing. I was really struggling so I came in a lot. But Professor Liu emphasized the translational aspect. She didn’t care if I was getting the correct P-value but that I could justify my choices: “Why did I choose this approach?  What should a clinician understand about this data?” Numbers are only part of the story. You could have the right answer and still not get full credit unless you could explain the implications in your own words.

The beauty of Biostatistics is that our expertise is needed for all disease areas, on all types of trials. Anyone looking to conduct a clinical trial must have a biostatistician on hand. And no machine can do biostats. You need a human. You need critical thinking skills. Every study is its own beast, with its own unique set of challenges. It requires someone with an adaptive tool set that can think critically about every problem.

I think that Mailman has equipped me with many of those tools and I’m looking forward to using them to tackle problems in the domain of public health. Starting this summer, I will be working as a biostatistician for a contract research organization. I owe a tremendous amount of thanks to the Career Services team for helping guide me through my job hunt from résumé critiques to mock interviews to just generally reducing my excessive anxiety. I am appreciative of my time at Mailman and very excited to begin working.