Feb 7 2025
Hi all! I am reviving the blog. Here’s my plan:
- It’ll be mostly me (Amy), but you might sometimes hear from lab members and collaborators, too.
- I’m going to prioritize getting something out there, and later I might try to make it beautiful/interlinked.
- If you have these skillz and want to help, please get in touch!
- Target audience is microbial ecologists, and others studying biodiversity using genomics. There’s technical underpinnings to all of this work, but I believe everyone can understand the most important concepts if they’re explained well. So, that’s on me! I’ll try to keep the math at maximum intuition and minimum technical details. I want to bring you along with me!
- To start, it’ll mostly be recaps of our work: PNF, for “Papers Need Friends.” (Thanks to the brilliant Taylor Reiter for this idea.) I find it challenging to write papers that accurately describe our work, but that also make clear to those-who-we-hope-to-recruit-as-users what we’re doing and why. We write for a range of journals along the spectrum of theoretical, to technical methodological, to non-technical methodological, to 100% science. So, when we write a paper that we hope will be thoughtfully reviewed by our statistician peers, we will write a blog post (a “Friend” for the paper) to explain to our users what it’s for, and informally outline how it works.
- Medium term plan is to get some course materials out there. STAMPS and various regression classes I’ve taught. God forbid I turn into a vlogger, but videos might be easier and prevent me agonizing for hours over written work.
- Long term: I have lofty plans to combat the enormous quantity of low-quality/wrong information out there about statistical analysis by making a mini encyclopedia of statistics (mostly with a microbial genomics emphasis) using Obsidian, but… well… let’s start small.
- When I give seminars, I’ll do my best to link them here. Sometimes I don’t give exactly the seminar I want to give (eg because the organisers asked for something specific), so maybe this is a place to supplement those with notes that occur to me after the fact, or to respond to questions that weren’t recorded.
- I’ll try to distinguish my opinion from fact. You should make up your own mind and not be drawn into rhetoric / factions. I hope to earn your trust, and be respectful of your time.
I hope you enjoy the revamped StatDivLab blog!
Amy Willis, PhD
Principal Investigator, Statistical Diversity Lab
Associate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington
Selected blog posts (you can see the full list under “Articles”):
- Papers Need Friends: Extension Spaces
- Papers Need Friends: radEmu
- How to write a great STAMPS 2025 application
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