Teaching Biostatistics in Medicine and Allied Health Sciences

Dr Damian JJ Farnell is a lecturer in the School of Dentistry at Cardiff University. He is the school lead for the Dental Data Science research group, which aims to leverage dental data in order to improve patient experiences and outcomes. His team provides research advice and statistical consultancy for projects in the school of dentistry. DJJF has a undergraduate degree (BSc) in mathematical physics, UMIST (1991) and a doctor of philosophy (PhD) in theoretical physics, UMIST (1994). He was the co-organiser of the "Burwalls" conferences in 2020 & 2021 along with Dr. Renata Medeiros Mirra. DJJF has published many abstracts or papers over the years in diverse areas of science. He has co-edited one volume in Lecture Notes in Physics (Springer Verlag) [1] and has co-written another book in this series [2]. 

Dr. Renata Medeiros Mirra is a Lecturer in Medical Statistics in the Cardiff School of Dentistry. Her background is Biology and her previous research interests are on Seabird Ecology. Through her research career she developed an interest in Statistics and became passionate about teaching. She retains a broad range of research interests in Biology, Ecology, Medicine, Dentistry, and Pedagogy and she has published work across all the disciplines, collaborating widely at national and international level. She is the co-organiser of Burwalls in 2020 & 2021 along with Dr. Damian Farnell. 

A Survey of Biostatistics Teaching in Medicine and Dentistry in Higher Education in the UK.- Evidence-based practice teaching for undergraduate dental students.- Teaching Medical Statistics within the context of Evidence Based Medicine.- Teaching Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) in the Health Sciences: The Significance of Significance.- Teaching conceptual understanding of p-values and of confidence intervals, whilst steering away from common misinterpretations.- Using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to represent the data generating mechanisms of disease and healthcare pathways: a guide for educators, students, practitioners and researchers.- Statistics without maths: using Random Sampling to teach Hypothesis Testing.- COVID-19: Online not distant - MSc students' feedback on an alternative approach to teaching 'Research Methods and Introduction to Statistics' at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology.- Common misconceptions of online statistics teaching.- Authentic project-based assessment using the Islands: Instructor's view.- An interactive application demonstrating frequentist and Bayesian inferential frame-works.- Teaching data analysis to life scientists using "R" statistical software: challenges, opportunities, and effective methods.- Statistics in a world without science.- Killing me softly with your stats teaching: How much stats is too much stats?.- Life as a medical statistician.