Thursday, August 22 2013, 3:30pm Vance Virginia Tech LISA and its partners will educate and train statisticians from developing countries to communicate and collaborate with non-statisticians and then support these statisticians to create statistical collaboration laboratories in their home countries to help researchers, government officials, local industries, and NGOs apply statistical thinking and data science to make better decisions through data. At LISA and elsewhere, we will unlock the collaborative potential of technically sound statisticians who will in turn unlock the research potential of their collaborators and teach other statisticians to do likewise. These local research collaborations, now with the power of statistical thinking and data science open to them, will be key to improving human welfare worldwide. This talk will focus on the steps of the LISA 2020 plan—including how LISA trains statisticians to become interdisciplinary collaborators—and how LISA and LISA 2020 is raising the profile of the Department of Statistics and Virginia Tech and attracting new PhD students to the program. More information on Eric Vance may be found at http://www.stat.vt.edu/facstaff/ervance/
