Building trust with and strengthening a large collaborative research group as the team statistician: Lessons learned from SETr and NAMASTE

Working with applied researchers to leverage data in order to test scientific hypotheses is at the heart of what applied statisticians aim to do. However, working as the team statistician in a large collaborative research team presents unique challenges and opportunities. In this work, I describe many of these challenges, and detail some of the lessons that I learned as the team statistician working on two ambitious large-scale ecological projects: SETr and NAMASTE. The primary objective of the SETr and NAMASTE projects was to use data from reserves in the National Estuarine Research Reserve system to better understand changes in marsh ecosystems. Whereas the SETr project focused on estimating elevation changes in these delicate marsh ecosystems, NAMASTE focused on understanding how changes in sea level impact plant communities at these same coastal locations. Complicated ecological data such as these require advanced statistical methods, but the statistician must balance a potential model's complexity with its interpretability. This talk will focus on methods and approaches for effectively using communication skills to build the trust of the team and to help to guide the project to a successful endpoint.

Collaboration

Quantitative Ecology

Environmental Statistics

Communication in a Team 

Effective Communication

Conference on Statistical Practice (CSP) 2024