Program - International Chinese Statistical Association

ICSA 2010 SYMPOSIUM ROUND TABLE DISCUSSIONS
Contact information: Eli Lilly and Company, Lilly Corporate Center Indianapolis, IN 46285,
sanger@lilly.com, 317-276-0279.
Round Table L7: How to Get Research Funding from Various Sources: Industry,
Government and Academia
Discussion Leader(s): Dr. Jeremy M G Taylor
Location and Time: Vision, Tuesday, June 22, 2010, 12:20 p.m.–1:20 p.m.
Abstract: Academic statisticians have a number of avenues for pursuing funding for their own
methods research. Academic institutions typically have seed money and pilot grant programs that are
targeted at junior faculty and provide a relatively small amount of support for 1 or 2 years. Amongst
government sources NSF is particularly well suited for those in Statistics Departments who are seeking
summer research funding. The NIH is a major source of funding for those whose research interests are
linked with biomedical research. Biostatisticians may seek funding as collaborators or co-investigators
working with others on a defined biomedical research problem or they make seek funding as a Principal
Investigator to develop their own research. A grant application to NIH would be reviewed by an
appropriate study section, the most likely study section for statistical methodology development is the
Biostatistical Methods and Research Design (BMRD) study section. Review committees at NSF and NIH
will review the quality and likely impact of the proposed research. NIH and NSF accept both unsolicited
grant applications and applications that respond to a particular need. Obtaining funding from NSF and
NIH for methodology development is competitive and can be challenging with typically between 10%
and 30% of grants being funded. Obtaining research funding from industry is also possible. The nature of
the funding is more likely to be driven by the needs of the company, and personal contacts can be
important for securing funding.
About Discussion Leader(s): Dr. Jeremy M G Taylor obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley,
Department of Statistics in 1983. He was on the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA from
1983 to 1998. He is currently the Pharmacia Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. He
is a former winner of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from APHA and the Michael Fry Award from the
Radiation Research Society. He is a Fellow of the ASA. He is a former chair of the Biometrics Section of
ASA and is a member of the IBC Council. He is an Associate Editor of Biometrics. He is currently a
member of the BMRD study section. His research interests are in Box-Cox transformation, longitudinal
and survival analysis, cure models, biomarkers, joint longitudinal/survival models, bioinformatics,
clinical trial design and applications in cancer and radiation oncology.
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