What is a Biostatistician? Biostatisticians study biology by using math, statistics, and data. How? By collecting, analyzing, and summarizing the data they get from their biological research, they can come to conclusions about medicine and farming.
They are an important part of any research team and often help write papers about research and topics that are new and important.
What does a Biostatistician do?
When you hear something like “80% of people who smoke get lung cancer,” you can be sure that a biostatistician worked hard to find that out.
These highly educated and trained people study and analyze the factors that affect the health and well-being of people, plants, and animals in order to come to conclusions about disorders, diseases, or other health risks. With this information, a biostatistician can look at the results and numbers of the analysis to study how different treatments work.
Biostatisticians come up with studies to find out what things are risky and which parts should be left out and which ones should be kept. They look over the information that was gathered and send papers or reports to different agencies or employers about what they found.
Biostatisticians are sometimes asked to figure out what causes certain medical problems and whether or not certain treatments for those problems pose any risk. They might be able to figure out a likely cause for the biological or medical situation they are being asked to study by using math.
During clinical studies, biostatisticians are used by drug companies to figure out how effective or ineffective a drug is on the human population as a whole. In addition to making new data, a biostatistician will sometimes look at the data that already exists on a certain topic to try to figure out what might happen. This is done to help shape public health policies and education.
Biostatisticians often collect the data they need before, during, and after an experiment to figure out how successful or unsuccessful the experiment was in the real world.
What does a Biostatistician do at work?
In the field of biostatistics, a person can work in universities, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, medical companies, and agricultural companies. They often work with other scientists as part of a team during normal office hours (40 hours per week). To talk with other scientists, it may be necessary to travel.
