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M. Davidian 583tion research. He was available to help when I got stuck and to discuss the nextstep. And now I was supposed to do this all on my own? Moreover, I didn’tknow the first thing about collaborating with scientists in other disciplines.The first year wasn’t easy as I made the transition from student in a verytheoretical department to faculty member in a much more applied one, in aposition in which I was expected to serve as a consultant to faculty in otherdepartments across campus. It was a bit like a “trial by fire” as I struggled tolearn what is truly the art of being a good applied statistician and collaborator,a skill light-years removed from my training in Chapel Hill. Simultaneously, asthe papers from my dissertation were accepted, the realization that I neededto move forward with research loomed. Sure, I had some extensions of mydissertation work I was pursuing, but after that, what would I do? I couldn’tkeep doing variance function estimation forever. The amount of time I spenton my mostly routine but extensive statistical consulting and teaching thetwo-semester sequence for PhD students in agriculture and life sciences leftme little time to ponder new research problems. To top it off, I was asked toserve on the university’s Undergraduate Courses and Curriculum Committee,and, not knowing any better, I agreed. I now know that a faculty member asjunior as I was should not be asked to serve on a committee that meets everyfew weeks for several hours and focuses solely on administrative activitiescompletely tangential to research or collaboration.I will admit to spending many evenings sitting on the balcony of myRaleigh apartment looking out at the parking lot and wondering how I wouldever compile a record worthy of promotion and tenure a scant six years later.But the most amazing thing happened. A student in the Department ofCrop Science who was taking my statistics course approached me after classand asked if she could make an appointment to discuss her dissertation research,which involved development of a new, experimental strain of soybean.She had conducted a field experiment over the last three growing seasons inwhich she had collected longitudinal data on measures of plant growth of boththe experimental and a commercial strain and was unsure of how to conductan analysis that would address the question of whether the two competingsoybean varieties had different specific features of their growth patterns. Thegrowth trajectories showed an “S-shaped” pattern that clearly couldn’t bedescribed by regression models she knew, and it did not seem to her thatanalysis of variance methods would address the questions. Could I help? (Ofcourse, at that point I could have no input on the design, which is sadly stilloften the case to this day, but luckily the experiment had been well-designedand conducted.)At about this same time, I regularly had been bemoaning my feelings ofinadequacy and being overwhelmed to my good friend David Giltinan, whohad graduated from Chapel Hill three years ahead of me and taken a job innonclinical research at the pharmaceutical company Merck. David recognizedthat some of my dissertation research was relevant to problems he was seeingand introduced me to the subject-matter areas and his collaborators. He had