men. At SIBS, at least half of the cutting edge of biostatistics meth- computer lab in 2005. It seems
attendees were women, and sev- odology, but the opportunities only fitting for a biostatistician
eral of the professors were women for collaboration are endless. I’ve to find her partner amidst the
as well. been so happy here that I decided hum of a dozen servers, right? He
After attending SIBS, I began to get actively involved in student never fails to bring the humor to
researching and applying to recruitment for our department my graduate student experience.
graduate programs in biostatis- in my roles as the president of UC Burke was also the first to predict
tics. Selecting a program is obvi- Berkeley’s Biostatistics Graduate that I would work with van der
ously a very personal choice and Student Association and as a stu- Laan for my doctoral research.
should be based on the factors dent ambassador for the School of A graduate of the University of
that are most important to you. I Public Health. If you’re interested Nebraska-Lincoln, Burke’s been at
visited several schools, ultimately in applying, I highly recommend Berkeley for more than 10 years.
choosing Berkeley because of visiting campus and meeting with Returning to the present, I
the faculty and their research. (I the biostatistics faculty at the just attended the Joint Statistical
should note I picked Berkeley pre-application information ses- Meetings in washington, DC,
before I knew whether they were sion, usually held in October of where I was fortunate to present
going to pick me.) I couldn’t have each year. my work on TMLE for nested
made a better decision. My edu- An outstanding education case-control studies, chair a ses-
cational and research experiences isn’t the only thing I’ve found on sion on missing data, and receive
at Berkeley have exceeded all my Berkeley’s campus. I met my boy- a graduate student award from
expectations. Not only are the fac- friend, Burke, who is a systems the ASA Section on Statistics in
ulty in my department at the very administrator, in the biostatistics Epidemiology. It’s amazing that
graduate students are afforded
such opportunities at the begin-
ning of their careers. Seven of
van der Laan’s other doctoral stu-
dents also presented their work
at JSM, and van der Laan gave a
talk in an invited session. Thus, it
definitely felt like a family affair.
It was also my first time at JSM,
and I was particularly fond of the
“first-timer” ribbon attached to
my badge.
After my positive JSM experi-
ence, I sit here looking forward to
the coming year as we dive fur-
ther into collaboration and appli-
cation of our methodology. For
those interested in learning more
about TMLE methods for both
observational and clinical trial
data, van der Laan will be pub-
lishing an open-access compila-
tion of papers on TMLE at www.
bepress.com/ucbbiostat this month.
The collection is titled “Readings
in Targeted Maximum Likelihood
Estimation, First Edition” and con-
tains more than 15 papers, most of
which have also been published in
peer-reviewed journals. n
18 AMsTAT NEWs OCTObER 2009
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