Should statisticians all work from home even after lockdown?

The number of people working remotely increased dramatically after the first COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. Should statisticians continue to work from home even after restrictions are eased?

Join us for a fun virtual debate, where we have the pleasure of hosting four speakers, at different stages of their career to give us their opinions on the topic. Debate will involve two teams that will present their arguments on each side of the issue.

Each speaker will give a 10 minute talk followed by a 20 minutes of panel discussion and Q&A from the audience. After the event, we will retire to a social gathering platform, that isn’t Zoom! There we will do some socialising, as well as have an opportunity for audience members to freely approach each other and the speakers.

Speakers

Emily Karahalios

Dr Emily Karahalios is a Senior Research Fellow (Biostatistics) in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne and in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University.  She has previously held appointments as Clinical Biostatistician at Western Health in Melbourne. Since completing her PhD in 2014, Emily has been involved in biostatistics teaching and research, with her research focused on the statistical methods for systematic reviews (i.e. pairwise and network meta-analysis).

Karen Lamb

Dr Karen is a consultant biostatistician in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She is passionate about statistical communication and gets a real buzz out of helping researchers in other disciplines use statistics to answer  their research questions. She has been fortunate to work with a diverse range of people, including doctors, psychologists, epidemiologists and social scientists! Karen loves meeting new clients, especially face-to-face rather than via Zoom!

Thomas Lumley

Thomas Lumley is a Professor of Biostatistics at University of Auckland. Thomas was born in Melbourne and studied maths at Monash, but since then has been overseas, at the University of Washington, Seattle and now at the University of Auckland.  He works in theoretical and applied biostatistics and statistical computing.  He has occasionally been called a data scientist.

Andrew Robinson

Andrew Robinson is Director of the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA), and Professor in applied statistics at the University of Melbourne. Andrew spends much of his time thinking about biosecurity at national borders, including analyzing inspection and interception data using statistical tools, designing and trialing inspection surveillance systems and developing metrics by which regulatory inspectorates can assess their performance.