Linking up with academics

This month’s interactive session looked at possible motivations, challenges, and approaches for collaborating with academic statisticians - defined loosely as those who primarily focus on developing new methods rather than applying existing ones, although the line between the two is often blurred.

Fiona Underwood provided an overview of these aspects:

  • How academic statisticians might contribute - ranging from quick explanations of their work and providing existing code, to more involved collaborations developing new methods and advising on larger projects.

  • Why we might want to work together – gaining access to additional expertise and increasing the visibility of applied work to academic staff and students, while academics can see their research applied to real world problems and gain ideas for new research opportunities.

  • Challenges – different approaches (more theoretical and idealised), different desired outputs (policy / project outputs vs publications), making organisational data accessible, different timescales and funding.

  • How we might work together – bringing people and datasets together, acting as a broker / translator between application and statistics, building relationships from small consultancies / MSc projects to longer term links through larger research programmes and networks.

Moving forwards, NABES will seek to coordinate common themes where the network might benefit from academic inputs and find ways to share these with the academic community.