Stephanie R. Land

As an undergraduate, I got excited whenever a friend would tell me about the research they were involved in, whether it was physics, computer science, economics, biology, or any other field. One of the things I love about being a collaborative statistician is that you can learn about the research interests of people in other fields, ask lots of questions, and then become an integral part of that research effort.

It also has become very important to me to be doing something that is useful and relevant in people's lives. For example, I am currently interested in psychiatric research. In collaboration with Joel Greenhouse, I am becoming involved in research on clinical depressions and anxiety disorders. In collaboration with Bill Eddy, Chris Genovese and others, I am learning about magnetic resonance imaging, one of the tools used in modern psychiatry. I am also involved in research on spinal cord injuries, melanoma vaccine and senile dementia medication.

In addition to getting to talk with interesting people and do useful work, statisticians get to have fun along the way. What we do is more creative than anyone outside the field might imagine (and maybe more than anyone inside the field would like to admit). We have to be creative because surprisingly often we are faced with research questions that are not satisfactorily addressed with standard methodology, and with data that cannot be viewed with standard graphical tools. I find a lot of joy in the constant challenges I face as a statistician.

Some Related Publications

Liblau R., VanEndert P.M., Sandberg-Wollheim M., Patel S., Lopez M., Land S., Fugger L., McDevitt H. (1993) "Antigen processing gene polymorphisms in HLA-DR2 multiple sclerosis," Neurology, August.

Land S. and Friedman J.H. (1994) "Adaptive signal regression," Proceedings of the Joint Statistical Meetings.

Land, S. and Friedman, J.H. (1996) "Variable fusion: a new method of adaptive signal regression," Technical report #114, Department of Statistics, Stanford University, 1996.