I like working on applied and theoretical problems at the same
time, and one nice thing about statistics is that you can be
useful in a widevariety of
areas. So my current work includes biostatistics and
also astrophysical applications. The
surprising thing is that the methods used are similar in both fields.
I recently gave a talk called "Astrophysics and Biostatistics: The Odd Couple"
at Penn State that made this point.
Since 2007, I have been helping to analyze a large single nucleotide
polymorphism (or SNP, pronounced snip) database with Stanford's Molecular
Profiling Research Program. This analysis has played a role in my
ongoing theoretical inquiries concerning large-scale simultaneous
inference: in the SNP study, this meant doing 555,000 hypothesis
tests simultaneously!
