Statisticians find sizzling market in RTP
Triangle Business Journal - by Catherine L. Traugot
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- Software engineers and drug researchers might claim all the headlines, but the Research Triangle region is a hotspot for another profession: statistics.
Next to Washington D.C., the Triangle is believed to have one of the largest concentrations of statisticians in the world according to Richard Kulkin, research vice president of statistics, health and social policy at Research Triangle Institute. RTI which conducts multidisciplinary contract research employs a total of 530 statisticians.
RTI recently paid homage to its statistical beginnings by dedicating a building to Gertrude Cox, one of RTI's founders and a pioneer in the field of statistics. In addition to helping start RTI, Cox also helped found statistics programs at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina.
Coincidentally, statisticians from N.C. State and UNC went on to start two of the biggest homegrown successes in the Triangle: SAS Institute, the largest privately-held software company in the world and Quintiles Transnational Corp., a leading contract pharmaceutical firm.
Tallying the data crunchers
Figuring out exactly how many statisticians work in the Triangle is a difficult undertaking. Kulkin says that at least 600 statisticians belong to area statistical societies and, like any specialty, not every practitioner joins a society.
One problem is that statisticians often work under other job titles, such as researcher or social scientist. And the U.S. Department of Labor does not track statisticians as a job category, Kulkin says.
But whatever title they go under, statisticians are in demand in the Triangle and elsewhere.
For instance, aside from those working at RTI, SAS and Quintiles, a substantial number of statisticians are conducting research and analyzing data at Triangle universities, Glaxo Wellcome, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
"The job market is pretty good here and the reputation is good as well,'' says Anand Ramaswami, a post doctoral associate in UNC's biostatistics program and president of the Triangle Chapter of the American Statistical Association. More than 300 statisticians belong to the local chapter, the largest chapter in the United States.
Driving the demand explains Kulkin, are technology changes that give statisticians the tools to increase efficiency, improve products and services and redefine the boundaries of research. Powerful desktop computers allow statisticians to run a program in minutes rather than the days that it might have taken ten years ago. And supercomputers handle jobs too complex to even be envisioned one or two decades ago.
"It's given us the capacity to revolutionize the way statisticians work,'' Kulkin says. But the computer hasn't isolated the profession, rather it is more common now for statisticians to work in teams pairing with software engineers, sociologists, physicians, agronomists, or whatever specialty is using statistical tools to improve outcomes.
Information managers
Ultimately, the job of the statistician is to help other professions make sense of the data that computers now let people gather, explains Kulkin.
SAS co-founder James Goodnight was a statistics professor at N.C. State when he founded the datamining software giant. SAS products help companies manage and use the flood of information that is gathered from the plant floor on up through feedback gathered from a product's consumers. The goal is to help companies use their data to enhance productivity, find new markets and ultimately improve their bottom line. While competing software has come on the market, Kulkin says statisticians still view SAS's products as the most precise.
Quintiles is another example of the way statistics has reshaped an industry. Founder Dennis Gillings was a professor of biostatistics at UNC in the 1970s and performed consulting work for pharmaceutical companies.
Through his work, Gillings began to see drug development not as a medical research problem but as an information management problem that could be solved by applying computerized technologies and statistical processes. At its RTP headquarters, 80 of the 1,200 staff members are statisticians. The company employs 19,000 worldwide and had revenues of $1 billion last year.
"(The Triangle) is a great place to be for a statistician,'' says Connie Moreadith, senior vice president of planning and business integration. Quintiles actively recruits from the three local universities. UNC offers degrees through two statistics programs, one of which is a biostatistics program awarded through the School of Public Health. N.C. State has undergraduate and graduate degree programs and Duke awards statistics degrees through its Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences. But Quintiles and other area companies also need to look outside the Triangle to fill statistician positions.
Researchers from the three universities, RTI and several other companies were present for RTI's annual statistics conference held in conjunction with the opening of the new Cox Building. The conference topics illustrate how statistics is being used to solve a wide range of problems. For instance, there was a discussion of a computer simulation program that helps drug developers perform virtual clinical trials. These virtual trials are designed to detect weaknesses in the trial plan before a company mounts the actual, and costly, clinical trial. One researcher is developing a framework to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of the different reading scales and tests available to determine a child's reading level. Another researcher is working on a better model for financial forecasting.
While this research is done by statisticians holding master's and Ph.D degrees, Kulkin says the most interesting part of the revolution in statistics is how many non-statisticians are using statistics in their every day work lives.
"You think a sport like football is intuitive, but on many levels they are using computer models to predict outcomes of running various plays,'' Kulkin says.
Statistical societies are aware of this revolution and are gearing much of their community outreach to helping the non-statistician work with numbers. The ASA chapter locally offers seminars and tutorials once a month for those who are using statistics in their job but don't have a strong math background.
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