Biostatistics without Borders
California Professor Takes Minitab to Vietnam
By Tony Coray
John Inciardi understands that data analysis can provide tremendous insight into the world we live in, and he is sharing his passion for statistics – and for using Minitab to apply them - with pharmacists-in-training around the world.
Inciardi is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he teaches the biostatistics component of a senior-level epidemiology course. Under his guidance, students research compelling issues such as the occurrence of potentially lethal side effects of medication.
“In a typical project, students will do a retrospective analysis of a drug like aprotinin, which is used to limit bleeding during cardiac surgery but has also been associated with severe toxicities,” Inciardi said. “The University will ask students to examine its hospital records to see if they notice the same problem, and the students will analyze the data to determine the odds that a person receiving the drug would have those side effects compared to a control group.”
Associate Professor John Inciardi and his students at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Inciardi believes Minitab® Statistical Software strongly supports his students’ efforts to explore these and other medical challenges. “Minitab is very powerful but also very easy to learn and use,” he said. “When I joined the faculty at UCSF, they were using a package called Stata® that just really complicated the learning process. So in 2003 I switched the university to Minitab and it made a big improvement in terms of the students’ ability to learn the material and satisfy their research requirement.”
Inciardi teaches with Minitab – a package he has been using since it was first developed in the 1970s – because of the strength of the statistical choices in basic statistics, exploratory data analysis, and regression analyses.
“I know Minitab offers value to quality improvement professionals, but it is also an extremely useful package for the health sciences,” he said. “Many people use Minitab to measure the odds of failure for something like an engine part. But the same analysis applies to the odds of success or failure for an individual on chemotherapy. In terms of the statistical analysis, the distinction between the two concerns is artificial.”
In addition to teaching at UCSF, Inciardi trains pharmacists in Vietnam in HIV issues and treatment as part of a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He also teaches biostatistics at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City, where he found his passion for analyzing data with Minitab inspires students in a way not even possible in the US.
“My Vietnamese colleague who translates my class tells me that students refer to it as ‘The Warm Course’ because in their minds it brings some warmth and soul to statistics,” he said. “Students in the United States often have experience using a statistical software package and understand the power of statistics, but in Vietnam they generally only learn formulas in what they call a ‘Cold Course.’ When they see what those formulas can do they are really in awe, and Minitab and its spectacular graphics are instrumental in this breakthrough. It’s like seeing a satellite on the ground – you don’t really understand what it can do until you launch it into space and see all the neat things it can reveal.”
Inciardi inspires his students by focusing less on the mathematical nature of statistics and more on how to apply and interpret them. “I take an approach very similar to the one used by Minitab’s Trainers - lots of real world examples with an emphasis on understanding the output.”
He notes that his students quickly embrace this hands-on approach, and that because Minitab is so intuitively designed and most of them read English, the language barrier doesn’t slow them down.
“I’ll be in the front of the classroom explaining how to conduct a logistic regression and my teaching assistants, who are strategically placed around the room to help the students follow along, will tell me the students have already found the method and completed the dialogue box – which really surprises me because I’m not going slowly!”
Inciardi’s dedication to his students gives them a solid and long-lasting professional foundation. Most students in the United States either go on to residency training or careers in hospital or community pharmacies, he says, while in Vietnam a majority seek careers in industry. And while the success of his class is clearly due to his passion for the material, he is quick to acknowledge how much Minitab facilitates it.
“Statistics is a subject that may sound logical and reasonable while you are sitting in the classroom, but for some reason, minds go blank when it comes time to conduct an analysis,” he says. “My goal is to dispel students’ fear of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data, and Minitab helps lift this fog of confusion by making the analysis very user friendly.”