The name of the field relates to the applications. The bio comes from biology and a lot of the problems that we study relate to human health effects. My area of specialization is the field of occupational and environmental epidemiology. Epidemiology is a field in itself that is available for study usually in schools of public health. In many schools the biostatistics and epidemiology are combined.

So in the field, we're expert in the quantification of these relationships through descriptive methods or mathematical modeling. There is a wide range of techniques that can be applied to do those things. That's why biostatisticians typically work in the health-related fields or are allied with medical or public health institutions.

Please describe what a biostatistican is.
This is a person who has skills and training in quantitative sciences and has the ability to apply those skills to the study of biomedical and public health problems.

What are the necessary skills for someone entering this field?
Our field, while it requires the mathematics for the theoretical basis of what we study, is more open to persons coming in from other areas as long as they do have some minimal quantitative skills and experience.

Our program, which is typical of many programs around the country, requires at least one year of calculus and hopefully some linear algebra. But if all this isn't in your record, there are remedial courses that will let someone make it up.

Is a biostatistician degree a graduate degree or a Ph.D.?
Biostatistics is not widely offered as an undergraduate program. There are some programs available around the country. Mostly it is offered through graduate programs in graduate schools of public health. In some cases there will be programs inside of medical schools or other kinds of health-related fields. Most of the major programs, like ours, are within a separate school of public health and offer Master's and Ph.D. degrees only.

Is there on-going testing to ensure someone is current in their skills?
Our field doesn't currently have any type of formal certification process. There has been talk about it, but it's been resisted by most of the statisticians in the field. The degree is your credential.

Are there subspecialties in this field?
Our department has two programs: one is biometry and the other is public health statistics. Biometry is a more mathematical version, more rigorous treatment of the subject as it applies to the development of methods, the application of methods. Whereas the public health statistics is designed for someone who needs to have some skills in biostatistics, but may already have a professional degree, say a physician or dentist, who wants the skills to help them do their research.

Quantitative risk assessment is a big area now. This involves the quantification of risk in populations and probabilities of developing disease or dying from a disease related to certain exposures due to an agent of concern.

What about advancement in this field?
It depends. Someone who gets into academic biostatistics would end up getting involved in research and clinical trials, quantitative risk assessment or the area that I'm in - environmental or occupational epidemiology. Some of the goals are to not only advance academically but to secure funding from government agencies or private sources to conduct your research, to publish articles that describe your research findings in peer review journals - that's the name of the game in academics.

If you go into government, the institutes of health such as The National Cancer Institute and others are doing a lot of research in the areas like epidemiology risk assessment and clinical trials. You would be doing much the same kind of work at the government level, but you would have a different kind of incentive for getting ahead.

In pharmaceutical employment, someone would probably start out as a part of a team of statisticians working on different trials of drugs. Then as one advances, become a team leader, then perhaps a branch chief and eventually move up the corporate ladder where one would become a manager, director or vice president of research.

What is the earning potential for a college graduate?
In academic research, Master's students currently start in the mid-40s with a Master of Science degree. A Ph.D. earns around mid-60s right out of school.

What are the hours that someone might work in this field?
Typically the hours are daylight hours - 9 to 5. If you're in an academic setting, you're more flexible. I put in a lot of time on weekends and evenings if the need arises to get a project deadline met or some publication out.

What types of changes have you seen in this profession?
We have found a need to keep up with the ever-increasing advancements, changes in the computing industry and high technology [in order] to remain competitive and up-to-date with things, especially in the micro-computing environment.

Are there any kinds of ethical issues that professionals in this field face?
There are a variety of ethical issues that a statistician faces day to day. Working with health-related data there is confidentiality and making sure if you're working with human subjects that you get proper informed consent from those persons to be involved in the research.

In doing statistical analysis it's very important to maintain the integrity of the data and to maintain integrity while you're making decisions about the outcome of the analyses. There are certain decisions that are made based on error rates. The way these rates are interpreted is very subjective. One has to maintain a high-level of objectivity while being subjective about interpreting the outcome for these things. In other words, one could get a certain research finding and interpret it if someone was trying to be biased.

You have to keep yourself very honest when you're working with data. We do a number of things to help that happen such as blinding where you have people on an experimental therapy, people on a standard therapy and you're trying to determine if the experimental therapy is more beneficial. We don't know who the people are.

What do you enjoy the most about this profession?
The thing that's the most exciting about this field is the demand from virtually any area outside of our area. Wherever there is data being collected for any purpose, there is a need to collect these data in an appropriate fashion to summarize the data, to organize the data, to present the data, to analyze it and interpret it. Statisticians are trained to process that information in a very meaningful way. That makes it exciting to me because you get exposed to a variety of problems and in our case, they're public health problems. So in an indirect way you feel that you're benefiting humankind by being part of a team that's discovering and identifying new therapeutic agents or harmful agents that can be controlled or eliminated from the environment.

What is the future for this profession?
In the corporate sector there is a trend toward downsizing and outsourcing. A lot of companies are not maintaining units that would be staffed by large numbers of biostatisticians. There are a lot of opportunities to jump in, get involved, to provide services where they are not available.

There is tremendous growth in the pharmaceutical industry. There are more and more drugs being developed and lots of companies are trying to find causes and treatments for cancer, Alzheimer's and AIDS.

Again, wherever there is research being conducted, there's data being collected and there's a need to have those data processed and analyzed.