# London

## Happy Birthday

My colleague (and lovely person!) Bianca forwarded me an advert for a very interesting event, she is organising at UCL. This is a celebration for the 80th birthday of Harvey Goldstein. The event will be a celebration of Statistics, honouring Harvey Goldstein’s work and with contributions from some of his closest collaborators. Speakers will give a retrospective of their work with Harvey, before he delivers the prestigious Otto Wolff Lecture.

## The associate

As part of our planned expansion (which hopefully will eventually turn into the UCL Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences), our department has just advertised a post for an Associate Professor in Statistics. We’ve recently hired two new lecturers (or Assistant Professors, to speak American English). They’ll start soon — I had the pleasure of sitting in the interview panel, which felt almost like a rave party. But we did have a very good set of candidates and the two who eventually got the job were really impressive.

## RSS-UCL Conference on Teaching Statistics in Higher Education

Some of my colleagues at UCL are organising a very interesting conference on teaching statistics in higher education. I think it will be very good, with people showing clever ways of getting people interested in statistics and contributing to good practices, which is always a very good thing! Also, this is related (kinda…) to an interesting post, discussing the impact of collaboration across different research areas having statistical input as central.

## Applications open

Applications are open for students enrolling in our MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science, for the academic year 2019 / 2020. Next year will be the third since we’ve started this and I think things are going really well. The number of applications have increased steadily (from a larger number than we expected in the first place!) and we’re getting to a point of having all the procedures very much in place — so I’m very pleased with it.

## Not long until abstract submission deadline...

Registration and Abstract Submission Open for BAYES 2018: Bayesian Biostatistics Workshop Satellite of ISBA 2018 20th–22nd June 2018 @ Homerton College, Cambridge, UK www.bayes-pharma.org Not long until abstract submission deadline - 31st March 2018 Overview Bayesian statistics is increasingly taking on a leading role in all areas of biomedical research, continually challenged by emerging questions in clinical medicine and public health. This workshop will bring together scientists interested in the latest applications and methodological developments of Bayesian Biostatistics in trial designs, addressing the need for more efficient and flexible approaches to answer key clinical questions; and in the analysis of complex observational data, to enhance causal understanding of disease processes in support of personalised clinical care and public health policies.

## HTA R Us

Together with colleagues around the UK, we’re organising a workshop on the use of R for statistical modelling in health economic evaluation (broadly speaking, “cost-effectiveness analysis”). It’s good that this is exciting news (contributing to taking my mind off all the politics & elections in the world…). But I think this really is exciting news, with a very good line up of speakers/talks. And I really think the objectives of this workshop are very interesting $$-$$ I think, ultimately, we’ll aim at also creating a repository for files/examples/models/templates so that people can start using R for their health economic modelling more and more.

We have a job opening at UCL − this time is in the Institute of Clinical Trials & Methodology and is for a Research Associate in Health Economics. Full details below. Applications are invited for a Research Associate in Health Economics to join the growing number of health economics researchers at UCL and its partner institutions. The post will join the Health Economics Analysis and Research Methodology Team in the Institute for Clinical Trials and Methodology (ICTM) at UCL, working primarily with the Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit (CCTU).

## Significance early-career writing competition

We’ve just issued the call for entries for our 2018 writing competition for early-career statisticians. Details of the competition are available online here. The competition is open to: (1) Students currently studying for a first degree, Master’s or PhD in statistics or related subjects; and (2) Graduates whose last qualification in statistics or related subjects (whether first degree, Master’s or PhD) was not more than five years ago. Last year’s winner, Kevin Lin, analysed user activity on the social media site, Reddit, to see whether young people were now more engaged with political news and topics.

## Commonwealth Games

Earlier this week, we found out that we have secured the Commonwealth Share Scholarship for our Master Programme in Health Economics & Decision Science. The Commonwealth Shared Scholarship Scheme is a joint initiative between the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (with funding from the Department for International Development (DFID), and UK universities, to support scholarships for students from developing Commonwealth countries who would not otherwise be able to study in the United Kingdom.

## Acro-juggling

Yesterday, we held our UCL Health Economics Network Symposium. Kobi has been poorly since Friday, which of course has coincide with a particularly busy week end/start to the new week… Sunday night was particularly bad and we managed to accomplish a trip to A&E (luckily all is good) and some healthy running around so that someone was at home with him at any given time, while teaching and, in fact, going to the Symposium (the picture to the left shows Marta and I practising our acro-juggling…).