IDEAS demonstrates medical statistics to local community

On Saturday, 6^th May, ESRs Haiyan, Fabiola and Pavel demonstrated the statistics behind drug trials at Lancaster University’s Community Day.  The event, which was attended by around 2000 people of all ages, showcased current research in diverse subject areas through a host of interactive activities.   The IDEAS network attracted a lot of interest from a wide audience who were keen to test their reactions in a noisy environment and see whether this was improved through wearing headphones.  After the participants have learnt their individual performance by playing a game modified from a response-adaptive randomisation design for clinical trials, our ESRs explained how such an adaptive design can be applied in early drug development.  It was a great chance to reach out to a broad audience in the name of IDEAS.  On the other hand, our ESRs also found this experience very useful to improve skills of presentation/teaching.  “Bringing innovative ideas in statistics to the public is cool! Today we really have to avoid using mathematical terms and equations to explain the significance of statistics to people not in the field”, say our ESRs.