DACCOTA Consulting and Mentoring
The Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Core (BERDC) provides consulting services to address a wide range of bio-statistical approaches relevant to cancer research.
Consultation will be provided in the following areas:
- Access to materials and statewide providers to help guide the research process utilizing relevant archived data
- Support for dealing with regulatory authorities including consultation on writing IRB protocols and consent forms, submitting IRB applications, and responding to IRB feedback
- Support for grants including consultation on selecting grant mechanisms, grant writing, and responding to grant reviews
- Discussions of and explanations for the selection and implementation of different types of study designs
- Assistance for researchers in selecting the best study design for their objective
- Statistical support for grant applications including pre- and post-grant support
- Assistance with issues related to sample size calculation and statistical power
- Support in data management including consultation on data storage, cleaning, monitoring, collection tools, preparation of data for analysis, data access and sharing, ethics and privacy (e.g., human subjects’ concerns), data archiving and preparation, and data storage and backup
- Support in assessment including consultation on selection of assessment instruments, assessment schedule, assessment development, and data collection
- Development of statistical analysis plans including the management of clinical research data
- Database platform selection for collecting and storing data as well as merging data with other resources
- Data preparation for statistical analysis.
- Methodological support for analyzing data including genomic experiments and laboratory and animal studies
- Support in understanding and interpreting results
- Support with manuscripts including journal selection, writing, and assistance in addressing reviewer feedback
- Statistical expertise to incorporate journal reviewers’ comments
Mentoring opportunities:
BERDC members will be available to serve as mentors to current and future DaCCoTA project directors, junior faculty, and graduate students. Mentors will be available to provide guidance on issues related to scientific methodology, ethical conduct of research, publication and presentation of findings, grants writing, management skills, career development and directorship training. Mentoring of graduate students will be a key feature of the BERDC, and members will be available to serve as mentors to graduate students as well as junior and senior faculty members. Our idea is to use a team-mentoring approach for junior faculty and graduate students. In this model, we will create several journal clubs focused on lung cancer, breast cancer, biostatistics, socializing, etc. Senior faculty members will organize these clubs in the form of webinars or face-to-face meetings to provide mentoring, disseminate current knowledge, and discuss bold ideas with graduate students and junior faculty members. Faculty can be members of several clubs based on their needs and interest. These types of mentoring activities will encourage the junior faculty to develop various relationships based on their own initiatives. The objectives of these clubs will be to provide the following:
- Guidance on issues related to scientific methodology
- Guidance on ethical conduct of research
- Timely feedback for publications, presentation of findings, grant writing, management skills, career development, and directorship training
- Support in determining priorities and avoiding pitfalls in research
- Assistance in building networks within their discipline and outside their discipline
- Information about the institution
- Support in teaching, research, understanding tenure and evaluation, creating work/life balance, and developing professional networks
- A culture of openness to new ideas and perspectives
- Support in building cross-cultural understanding in an increasingly diverse workforce
Contact the BERDC
Be sure to contact the BERDC to schedule a consultation.