Online Colloquium: Rafael Irizarry - The Important and Extensive Role of Applied Statistics in the Biological Sciences and Beyond

Rafael Irizarry

Professor and Chair, Department of Data Sciences, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Professor of Applied Statistics, Harvard University

Statistics has been at the center of many exciting accomplishments of the 21st century, with applied statistics being widely used across several industries and by policy makers. In academia, the number of statisticians becoming leaders in other fields like environmental sciences, human genetics, genomics, and social sciences continues to grow. The unprecedented advances in digital technology during the second half of the 20th century has produced a measurement revolution that is transforming the world. Many areas of science are now being driven by new measurement technologies and many insights are being made by discovery-driven, as opposed to hypothesis-driven, experiments. The current scientific era is defined by its dependence on data and the statistical methods and concepts developed during the 20th century provide an incomparable toolbox to help tackle current challenges. In this talk I will give several specific example including some from own research in genomics and estimating the effects of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico.