Recent News of the SCC

The Department’s Newsletter has been on hiatus for a while, so let's catch you up on the SCC news. For those of you who don’t know, the “SCC” is the UGA Statistical Consulting Center. The Center, which I direct, is a unit of the Department of Statistics, but also a Core Facility of the UGA Office of Research. That means we serve the university’s research mission by providing statistical support to students, staff, and faculty investigators across campus. We also work with external clients, such as businesses, academics at other universities, government entities, and others. Supporting research at the university is just part of our mission; we also exist to educate our students. The SCC provides valuable training and practical experience that students can’t easily get in the classroom. Fortunately, our consulting and collaboration activities simultaneously advance our research and education goals very effectively.  

The SCC typically provides support for about five or six statistics graduate students to work as consultants during the academic year in addition to a few during the summer. We also have several students serving the SCC as volunteers at any given time. We always attract some of the most talented students in the Department and working with them is a great privilege for me. In academic year 2024-25, our core group of consultants is Jiemiao Chen, Shiyuan Deng, Jingying Gao, Hanna Kim, Laura Mathews, and Jianing Xu, but other members of our staff in recent semesters include Huimin Hu, Ke Hu, Ryan Smith, Yu Wang, Mengyun Yu, Duna Zhan, Jialin Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, and Lingyu Zhao. 

These folks are all great, but each year we recognize two students for exceptional contributions. In 2023-24, Tianyi Zhang, who worked on a volunteer basis in Spring 2024, was named Best Volunteer Consultant, while Shiyuan Deng was recognized as Best Consultant. To catch you up on winners from the recent past, Qian Zhang and Lingyu Zhao earned the Best Volunteer Consultant honor in AYs 2021-22 and 2022-23, respectively, while Huimin Hu and Jianing Xu were recognized as Best Consultant in those years. 

Among the principal perks of working at the SCC is the opportunity to work on a wonderfully diverse collection of projects from a talented pool of clients. For an SCC consultant, the rich set of problems we work on makes life interesting(!), provides a unique chance to develop skills, and brings opportunities to get tangible and marketable accomplishments. On that last count, I am proud of the growing number of co-authorship credits that SCC consultants have garnered in recent years. In calendar years 2022 and 2023, student consultants co-authored 16 journal articles related to SCC projects. During the same period, consultants co-authored at least 13 abstracts submitted for presentation at academic conferences. This work ranges over academic fields including forest ecology, nutrition science, veterinary medicine, crop science, bone health, and pharmacoepidemiology.

Pharmacoepidemiology and health outcomes research are areas in which the SCC has been very active, thanks to a relationship with the UGA College of Pharmacy. In August 2021, Dr. Henry Young, Head of the UGA Department of Clinical & Administrative Pharmacy, approached the SCC to collaborate on research projects involving IBM (now Merative) MarketScan Research Databases, which form a vast collection of data from health insurance claims from patients insured under employer health care plans, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. Dr. Young has dedicated College of Pharmacy research funds toward the support of SCC consultants over several consecutive semesters. In return, we collaborate and provide statistical support for research projects built on the MarketScan data. These projects are numerous and wide-ranging, involving dozens of faculty and students from the UGA Colleges of Pharmacy and Public Health, and other institutions. This has been a successful and mutually beneficial relationship for the SCC and the College of Pharmacy (with spillover to other units at the University), and I am very grateful to Dr. Young for his commitment to it. 

One bittersweet piece of recent news is that Dr. Xianyan Chen resigned from her position as Associate Director of the SCC in December 2023. Dr. Chen served ably in that position since August of 2016 and we will sorely miss her steady and capable management of our day-to-day operations. The positive side of this news is that she left her position at the SCC for a wonderful opportunity to join the faculty in the UGA Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics as an assistant professor. This is a position that Xianyan is excited about and in which I am sure she will excel. Best of all, she remains nearby, and I look forward to a continued personal and professional relationship with her in the future. 

I am excited to announce that we hired Dr. Jinae Lee to replace Xianyan as the new Associate Director of the SCC, starting in August, 2024. Dr. Lee is no stranger to our department, having earned her PhD in statistics from UGA in 2013. Since that time, she worked as faculty in the Biostatistical Collaboration Unit at Yonsei University and in several other positions in Korea, most recently at the International Vaccine Institute. Jinae has outstanding preparation for the work she will do at the SCC and I am excited to welcome her back to UGA.  

If you’d like to contribute to the SCC, learn more about what we do, or if you just want to get in touch and share your latest news, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to e-mail me at danhall@uga.edu. Or visit us on our website (www.stat.uga.edu/consulting), where you can submit a consultation request or sign up for our mailing list to learn about our Seminar Series and to keep abreast of other news. 

Dan Hall
Director, UGA Statistical Consulting Center