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The George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing statistics department and its Statistics Collaboration Core is working with Inova Health Care Services as part of a partnership called “iTHRIV.” Inova is Northern Virginia’s leading nonprofit healthcare provider, with 20,000+ team members providing more than two million patient visits each year at five hospitals. This partnership is funded by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
“The collaboration with Inova Health is one of the examples of Mason Statistics actively collaborating in and/or taking leadership positions on large projects aimed at impacting science and society,” says Jiayang Sun, chair of the Mason Department of Statistics. Ben Sieyon Lee, a faculty member in the department, adds, “By connecting experts from both Mason and Inova, we are able to explore exciting research opportunities at the intersection of statistics and health care research. Many would have been otherwise overlooked.”
The Collaboration Core works with external organizations to provide support in the areas of statistical expertise; grant, manuscript writing, and conference abstract writings; survey design; research in statistics and data science; and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Collaboration Core website guides outside groups through the project proposal process.
The Core allows Mason faculty to be engaged with research in new ways and helps new, tenure-track faculty get exposed to grant work and external collaborators. In addition, it allows the university to establish itself as a leader in data science. “Our graduate students also play an active role in these collaborations,” says Lee. “They gain valuable experience in applying their statistical knowledge to real-world challenges.”