This fall, 13 seniors in the class collaborated with partners from Labcorp, DLH Corporation and the Animal Park at the Conservators Center. Course instructor Mark Weaver, associate professor of statistics, worked with the external partners to organize the projects before the start of the semester, forming the students into teams comprising of complementary skill sets and mentored the teams through to project completion.

The team that worked with Labcorp included team lead Jack Autieri, along with Elizabeth Blandin, Logan Laszewski, Claire Rainey and Evan Wu. This team was tasked with building a dashboard in Tableau to help visualize and analyze the productivity and efficiency of Labcorp’s cytotechnology screening processes across their entire national enterprise. The resulting dashboard will provide a key component in the efforts of Labcorp’s Supply Chain Operations group to optimize turnaround time of cytology specimens.

The team that worked with the Animal Park at the Conservators Center included team lead Rebecca Prisand, along with Danny Liu, Adriana Shea and Marques Walker. These students used Tableau, SAS and R software to generate a large number of impressive data visualizations to help their collaborators explore the relationships between social media engagement and visitations and donations to the Animal Park.

“As an ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ faculty member, I value opportunities for students to apply their academic and personal talents in a context beyond the classroom,” said Kim Epting, professor of psychology. “As a volunteer staff member at the Animal Park, I deeply appreciate supportive work from groups in the area who wish to lend their expertise in service of the nonprofit and its core mission to care for animals and educate people. This was an opportunity for the best of both worlds.”

Team lead Hannah Enck, JB Buckner, Tobias Coker and Lainey English had the opportunity to work with statisticians from DLH Corporation (including Angela Jeffers ’20, a Practicum alum). This team used R software to conduct simulation studies to estimate statistical power for nonparametric tests in rodent toxicology studies conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. This project exposed the team to theoretical work that would be more typical for a masters-level statistician.

All three teams conducted highly professional presentations of their work for their partners. Following the semester, Elizabeth Blandin, who worked on the Labcorp team, commented, “I didn’t feel like a student in this course but like an actual consultant.”

In their article, “,” Austin and Weaver applied a novel epidemiological approach to explore the association between particulate matter resulting from increased fires in the Peruvian Amazon and incidence of asthma among children living in the region. This modeling approach combines geospatial raster data, which are data laid out in a uniform grid over an entire region or country, with data from other sources, including meta analyses and burden of disease models. The results of the burden of disease assessment suggest that increased fires in recent years have led to up to 15,000 additional asthma cases among Peruvian children.

Austin previously presented her research in spring 2022 at both the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ’s SURF day. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Analytics at North Carolina State University.

The Civil Society Unit of the U.N. surveyed representatives from international non-governmental organizations about misinformation that they had heard or received concerning COVID-19. The survey was conducted online between April and August 2020.

The students and their U.N. collaborators participated in a project kick-off meeting in August via Microsoft Teams. The students then spent the next month analyzing the data. The primary focus of the analysis revolved around two open-ended text fields that captured the nature and sources of the misinformation reported. Many of the text entries had to first be translated into English using an online software package. In October, the students met again via Teams with a larger group of U.N. representatives to present their results, which included an online app that allows a user to summarize the misinformation types by region or individual country.

The senior statistics majors who worked together on this project are Isabel Bufton, Will Cooper, Sam Greenberg, Cara Linder, Hannaleigh Pierce, Samantha Polese and Jacob Wheeler. Mark Weaver, assistant professor of statistics, led this class. Weaver collaborated with Kathryn Good, programme management officer of the Civil Society Unit, to conceive this joint project.

Assistant Professor of Statistics Mark Weaver collaborated with Dr. Beth Raymond from Gynuity Health Projects in New York City and other researchers to conduct a study to explore the possibility of using pregnancy-associated proteins to predict the gestational age of a pregnancy. The primary paper from this study was published in the May 2020 issue of the journal Contraception. Additional collaborators were from Gynuity Health Projects, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center.

In their article, , the authors describe the results of a study in which they enrolled 245 pregnant women between about 6 and 40 weeks gestational age. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from each woman. The specimens were assayed for the presence of seven pregnancy-related proteins. Statistical analyses using receiver operating characteristic curves were then conducted to evaluate whether any of the proteins could be used to reliably detect whether a pregnancy was at least 70 days gestational age.

The authors identified two proteins in serum, pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A) and a disintegrin and metalloproteinase 12 (ADAM-12), that worked remarkably well for detecting pregnancies that were at least 70 days gestational age. The authors focused on 70 days gestational age in this research because that is the current limit in the United States for using the drug mifepristone for medical termination of pregnancy. Identifying a reliable protein marker for gestational age may be particularly important for contexts in which ultrasound is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. This study represents an important link in a series of studies being conducted by these researchers that are designed to increase safe access to medical abortion for women who choose to end their pregnancies within the first 10 weeks.

Weaver’s work on this project was supported by a consulting agreement with Gynuity Health Projects.

It is well-accepted that the most reliable information regarding new medical treatments comes from well-conducted randomized trials. But are all published trials equally reliable? Isn't it possible that some published results are seriously biased and, therefore, unreliable?

Assistant Professor of Statistics Mark Weaver collaborated with Chris Jones from Rowan University and Timothy Platts-Mills from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with other colleagues, to design a new study to investigate one practice that could lead to serious bias in trial publications, so-called "outcome switching." Before journals agree to publish the results of any trial, reviewers and editors should consider whether the primary outcome variable described in the manuscript is the same one that the trial investigators initially started off investigating. If it's not, that is, if the investigators changed outcomes during the trial or, even worse, during the analysis of the trial data, the interpretation of the results could be completely unreliable.

With funding from the Office of Research Integrity, Weaver and colleagues designed and initiated a trial among 13 top medical journals to test the effectiveness of a new intervention intended to reduce the prevalence of hidden outcome switching in published trials. The new study used a novel approach called a "stepped-wedge" design. In this design, all 13 journals began in the control condition. Then, each month during the 10-month study, one or two journals will be crossed over to the intervention condition so that by the end of the trial all thirteen journals will be receiving the intervention. The order in which the journals will be crossed over was randomized by Weaver prior to beginning the study.

The novel, yet amazingly simple, intervention developed by Jones and colleagues is to provide peer reviewers with information about the pre-registered primary outcome available from the site ClinicalTrials.gov. The goal is to decreases inconsistencies between prospectively registered and published primary outcomes. A paper detailing the protocol for this study was recently published in the open-access journal .

The title of the research is "Reducing the Transition from Acute to Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain Among Older Adults." The goal of this grant is to conduct a three-arm randomized trial of an emergency department-based intervention to improve early outpatient pain management in older adults. The intervention to be tested combines an educational video with telecare phone follow-up by a nurse 48-72 hours after the Emergency Department visit. Outcomes will include pain symptoms, function, analgesic side effects, and long-term opioid use.

The grant period will run until Nov. 30, 2023 (R01AG058702).

In their article, ““, the authors summarize and meta-analyze results that had been previously published in thirty-eight separate manuscripts. The review included both randomized and non-randomized studies, the latter of which included both prospective and retrospective cohort studies and case series. The work was published in the leading journal in its field, Obstetrics and Gynecology (also known as “The Green Journal”).

Current clinical guidelines recommend the serial use of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, for medical termination of early pregnancies. However, due to the cost and often limited availability of mifepristone, there has been interest in evaluating the effectiveness and safety of misoprostol alone as an inexpensive and widely available alternative. Based on the evidence provided, the authors conclude that misoprostol used alone is safe and effective and should be offered as an option for women seeking medical abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.

The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (K12HD001271), the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and Gynuity Health Projects.