Ransom Horne Jr Professor Of Cancer Research
All my work at MD Anderson centered on trying to distill complex data (typically thousands of observations per patient) to inform patient care, e.g., will this patient respond better to drug A or B? Initially, I worked on smaller projects with the support of a few analysts; over time I shifted more to overseeing analysis requirements for larger projects and directing groups of analysts and sometimes junior faculty. In support of this research role, I helped write lots of scientific papers, obtain grant funding from NIH/NCI, present and summarize our work for a wide variety of audiences, and advocate for policies to improve how complex data was used for clinical care. The job required both fluency with statistics/bioinformatics and programming (mostly R), and collaborating with and learning from a wide variety of subject matter experts to place the questions being asked in context - many of these collaborations continued for years.
