Have you ever considered a career outside of statistics?

Learn from Lucy Rowell

Have you ever thought of having an additional or changing career?
What are the things you must prepare for when considering this?

Today, we interview Lucy on how can statisticians create an impact beyond statistics. Lucy has a very inspiring career, and she has started as a statistician and got further responsibilities.

We also talk about the following points:

• You started as a statistician in your career, but then you got further responsibilities. How did this happen?
• How has your knowledge as a statistician helped you to be successful in your new roles?
• Which things did you need to learn new?
• What does leadership mean for you personally?
• Do you have a story where you struggled in terms of your leadership skills and how you grew out of it?
• When do you think is the right time to switch into a career outside of statistics?
• Which leadership skills have helped you the most?

Lucy Rowell

Group Head of Affiliate Partnerships, Personalised Health Care Data Science (Roche) and PSI Chair

During her career, she has worked across both early and late-stage development and many therapeutic areas. She has performed varying statistical roles and spent the vast majority of her career being a strategic leader within Roche, without any line management experience. Something she feels very passionate about encouraging others who may also want to follow a non-line management career. As part of this time for 3 years, she was a Global Development Team Leader, responsible for leading the design, execution, and delivery of clinical development plans (CDPs), through approval and reimbursement, for a number of molecules across multiple indications. This team included clinical, safety, regulatory, biometrics, operations, and pharmacology. This experience has been one of the most rewarding to date and showed to her the diverse strengths Biostatisticians can bring to leading teams and drug development strategies outside of Biometrics. She also completed a one-year rotation into the UK Affiliate in a combined Medical Manager and Brand Manager role (no statistics!), providing input to our Global teams on UK strategies, to maximise their chances for access to drugs for UK patients.

18 months ago, she took on my first line management position as the Group Head of Affiliate Partnerships within their personalised healthcare data science group. Where she has been responsible for defining and building the group globally to support local affiliates in how to leverage real-world
data in support of medical, access, and regulatory goals. She has been engaged in the PSI for 9 years; supporting the scientific committee, as the PSI Conference Chair and since July 2019 as the PSI Chairwoman.

Listen to this episode and become an effective statistician!