Background
Dr Simon R. White is available to members of the Department to discuss, support and collaborate on statistical issues/analyses. There are two strands to this: supporting postgraduate students directly, and as a potential statistical collaborator to all research groups.
This separation is by design, such that support and advice can be targeted at postgraduate students. This statistical support will be available to all students across all sites and at all points (i.e. any year) of their study.
Expectations
Support will take the form of guidance and advice to help the student direct statistical aspects of their research project; including identifying additional training needs (computational and statistical). Students will be able to discuss high level questions on research strategy, potential study design issues, and analysis plans.
This support is not to be used regularly for incremental steps of an analysis, nor as surrogate supervision meetings.
There will be no expectation to develop new statistical methodologies or approaches, nor will any analysis be run for the student. As such there is no expectation for formal recognition in the thesis/dissertation, however an acknowledgement would be welcome. Any resulting publications should acknowledge the support (Dr White, and this support, is funded by the NIHR BRC Mental Health Theme).
Moving beyond the scope of this support
If the scope moves beyond high level advice or requires substantial/regular meetings then a discussion with the supervisory team (and potentially the Postgraduate Education Committee) will be required to establish the statistical needs and resources required by the student and their project.
Moving beyond this support strand may involve formal recognition within the thesis/dissertation team, a formal collaboration (to fund time attributed to the project), and authorship on research outputs.
Bookable slots
Dr White has reserved one hour per week for this support (plus preparation time). Meetings will be 30 or 60 minutes depending on complexity and will (typically) be at the Herchel Smith Building or Institute of Public Health on Wednesday or Friday afternoons, or by zoom. Supervisors are welcome to attend or the meeting can be one-on-one (with the student being responsible for reporting back to their supervisory team).
Supervisors or Students may arrange an appointment by emailing Dr White directly (sw539@cam.ac.uk).
Preparation
To ensure the meeting is productive this Booking Form must be completed and submitted at least one week prior to the meeting. The form will provide background to the research project and current research issues. It may be beneficial to also attach a brief report (max 3 pages). However, pages of unannotated analysis output are not helpful – nor will they be read.
If the meeting is to discuss a specific analysis, the student should bring the relevant analysis output ready to the meeting – there will be little time to run analyses on data during the meeting.
Record of meetings
A record of all meetings will be provided to the Postgraduate Education Committee each term. This will be used to help assess the usage of this support and student engagement with it.