My Platform
Adapting change while staying true to diversity and equity, strengthening our statistical connections across nations, making impact through effective communications and collaborations, and engaging younger generation, will help us meet future challenges. Among many important areas for promoting our practice and profession of statistics, I would like to work with you on three focused areas:
Agile Statistical Connections Across Nations: The need to understand, interpret, and report the infections and deaths, from a pandemic, in real time was paramount making informed health policy decision at local, regional, national, and global level. I was encouraged by the statistical community as they responded quickly to help answer ever changing questions during the pandemic. It was important that statisticians around the world share information and learn from each other to help address not only global but also local assessments. Further strengthening our existing outreach through educational ambassadors, committees, sections, and other avenues by creating robust communication channels amongst statistician across nations will better prepare us for future challenges and advance the profession of statistics.
Collaboration and Communication Across Industry, Government, and Academia: Collaboration and Communication across business and industry, government, and academia are essential to solve real world problems and foster innovation, as we have seen with partnerships to address the Covid challenge. I have spent major part of my career collaborating across diverse group of non-statisticians and have seen the power of harnessing diverse ideas and effective communications in making a positive impact. Our collaborator will buy in to statistical thinking only when they are able to understand the point we are making. We need to continue to bring statistical thinking to other disciplines and invite them to our backyard. I will also continue to build on several related initiatives by the past ASA presidents.
Engaging our Younger Generation and Mentoring: Statistics touches everyone in some shape or form but still many younger students are not so familiar with statistics as a profession. We should continue to expand our engagement with students, counselors, and others to help them see statistics, an important pillar of data science and machine learning, as versatile and rewarding careers with a social impact. The future of our profession depends heavily on our success in preparing our leaders of tomorrow!