Young Statisticians Seminar (25th October 2017), Vienna

The Vienna Biometric Section of the Austro-Swiss region (ROeS) part of the International Biometric Society (IBS) organises events with lectures on various biostatistical topics on an annual basis.

On the 25th October 2017, the Herbstseminar was co-hosted by IBS, Medical University of Vienna and IDEAS. The organisers were three IDEAS Early Stage Researchers, Johanna Mielke, Julia Niewczas and Nicolas Ballarini, who were provided with the opportunity to gain experience of the other side of scientific meetings in having responsibilities such as inviting speakers, finding a venue for the event, promotion, logistics, etc.

The topic of the seminar was “Young Statisticians” and there were eight presentations of whom 6 were from IDEAS (Arsenio Nhacolo, Johanna Mielke, Julia Niewczas, Nicolas Ballarini, Pavel Mozgunov, Saswati Saha). The other speakers, Christine and Hana, were local PhD students from the Section for Clinical Biometrics of CeMSIIS, Medical University of Vienna. The seminar was divided into two sessions that were chaired by invited discussants Gerd Rosenkranz and Harald Heinzl, whom the organisers would like to thank for kindly agreeing to participate. They provided valuable feedback on the presentations including general comments as well as suggestions for research extensions or possible issues.

After a slightly stressful morning due to one of the speakers having a delayed flight, the event was a great success. Organiser Julia said: “It was a really great experience discovering a different side of being an ESR where we could actually leave our desks and put in practice our soft skills that we have been undertaking training in”. Nicolas also added “At the beginning, I was worried in case there would only be us at the venue, but this wasn’t the case. We had a very successful morning and I received really useful feedback on my research”.

The full list of IDEAS presentations at the seminar were:

• Johanna Mielke (Novartis Pharma, Basel):  Incorporating Historical information in Biosimilar Trials: Challenges and a Hybrid Bayesian-frequentist Approach.
• Saswati Saha (Universitaet Bremen): Major challenges in dose finding studies in Phase II clinical trials and how to deal with it.
• Arsenio Nhacolo (Universitaet Bremen): Effect estimates from oncology Phase II adaptive designs and their use in planning Phase III trials.
• Pavel Mozgunov (Lancaster University): A Phase I/II Design for Molecularly Targeted Agents that does not Require an Assumption of Monotonicity.
• Julia Niewczas (Medizinische Universität Wien) : Optimal Rejection Regions for Multi-arm trial.
• Nicolas Ballarini (Medizinische Universität Wien): Subgroup Identification via the Predicted Individual Treatment Effect.

ESR Johanna presents her research

ESR Saswati also presented her latest findings