10:29 PM, October 13, 2024
A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to go to the Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland, Oregon, which was actually my first ever time visiting the west coast! Because I wasn’t presenting any research, I was just there to network, learn more about the use of statistics in the pharmaceutical industry, and have a good time. I also had the chance to bust out some moves on the dance floor at the dance party that JSM held right after the President’s address. When my flight landed, my first experience of Portland was the colorful mural pictured above from the Portland International airport, which by itself gives you a reasonable idea of the type of city that Portland is. I then tried to get an uber to my hotel, only to realize that all of the Uber’s were over $50 even though the hotel was only an 8 minute drive away, so instead I had to ask people in the airport to direct me to the Tram stop, which luckily took me within a couple of blocks of the apartment. While the Tram made a lot of really awful sounding mechanical noises every time it went around a turn, the fact that none of the other passengers seemed to bothered reassured me that the tram was safe. Entering the hotel I was immediately struck by the artsiness and the intentionality of design behind the lobby, which also had a cute coffee shop.
At the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to people working in the pharmaceutical industry, who encouraged me to build a good foundation in both frequentist and bayesian methods, as well as to get internship experience before graduation, and the more experience the better. I also got to ask them about the work that they did, and got a variety of answers, which included bayesian adaptive trial design, Phase I Clinical trials and dose finding studies, and rare diseases. In addition I had the opportunity listen to Rob Tibshirani’s talk about pre-trained LASSO, as well as my friend Luke Duttweiler’s talk in the Bayesian section and Quiyi Wu’s poster talk about her thesis work in image denoising. There was also a wonderfully inspiring speech by Veronika Rockova about her struggles in becoming a statistician in a part of the world where at the time (and potentially still today) she had to face and overcame serious barriers to entry into academia because she was a woman. She is a professor of Econometrics and Statistics at the prestigious University of Chicago, and received the ASA President’s Award at the conference.
All that, and I got to eat some delicious brisket at Matt’s Barbeque with Cuong Pham and Luke, and I had of the best chips with salsa & guac that I’ve ever had in my life right at the hotel. In sum, I’d say my first conference was an unqualified success, and I can’t wait for the next conference I have the opportunity to attend.
