Who is writing and talking here?
We’re Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske. We create and edit the content, in addition to managing our work lives, home lives and being continuous learners. We invite you to come and learn along with us to work more effectively, lead courageously, and solve problems innovatively.
Alexander Schacht
Alexander Schacht is a Statistician and the Executive VP of Launch and Commercialisation Data Sciences at Veramed. Alexander studied mathematics and received his PhD in biostatistics on non-parametric statistics from the University of Göttingen in Germany. He has authored more than 70 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and regularly speaks at international conferences, such as PSI and EADV.
Alexander has more than 20 years of experience working as a statistician in healthcare, working primarily on phase IIIb and IV (RCT, observational studies, HTA submission, commercialisation work) with some regulatory work, as well as some work within the early phases of clinical development.
Alexander is interested in a broad range of methodological areas with a specific focus on helping pharmaceutical and biotech companies make better, data-driven decisions. In fact, this keen interest saw Alexander become the chair of the EFSPI/SPI SIG on benefit-risk, founder and chair of the data visualisation SIG and the Launch and Lifecycle SIG. Alexander has also served PSI as a board director responsible for communications.
Alexander is a happy husband and father of three wonderful kids, who he credits for his continued passion and drive to help patients worldwide. In his spare time, Alexander loves running and listening to podcasts.
Benjamin Piske
Benjamin Piske got interested in statistics during his studies of mathematics and economics at the University of Göttingen, where he attended courses of statistics at the department of medical statistics. Focusing on non-parametric statistics, he completed his MSc in 2003 and continued to work at the department until starting with a global full service CRO in April 2004. Currently he is working at Cytel as a Senior Director, Biostatistics, heading the team in North America.
He started as biostatistician in the phase IIIb/IV environment and worked on interventional and non-interventional late phase trials, commercialization work, publication / presentation support, registries and investigator-driven trials in several therapeutic areas – mainly oncology, haematology and neurology – using a broad range of statistical methods. During the later stages of his career, Benjamin also worked on phase II and phase III trials, as well as submissions.
In 2008 Benjamin took over line management responsibility for a primarily remote team, and since then, developed more and more into a senior managing position with focus on people development. He’s primarily working home based with occasional days in the Cytel office in Berlin, Germany.
“Besides the challenging job and the not less challenging family responsibilities with having 4 children, I love to travel, occasionally play squash, but more frequently record podcast episodes with Alexander.”
Learn more about us in our first episode of the podcast and check out our LinkedIn profiles:
Is this podcast for you?
The Effective Statistician helps statisticians (or maybe data scientist) both at a junior and experienced level. We’ll cover topics relevant for those with and without administrative leadership positions. Our examples arise from the health sector mainly, but we assume, that statisticians or data scientists outside of this industry will surely benefit as well.
How will this podcast boost your career?
Learning and following up on the topics in our podcast will help you to become more effective at work through:
- learning about ongoing methodological discussions
- Applying better statistical methods
- building competency
- becoming a leader (with or without an administrative title)
- Influencing without authority
- Building your brand
- Getting the right things done effectively
- Collaborating effectively within and across companies/organizations
We will not cover advanced programming skills and news, just for sharing them. While we will talk about upcoming events, we will always focus on the content to make the podcast episodes as valuable as possible.
Our approach to podcasting
We’re aiming high by producing our show weekly, with possible exceptions being vacation periods. We target our episodes at a length of about 20 to 30 minutes, but ultimately, the content will drive the duration.
We want to balance our show with co-hosting episodes during which we discuss topics between the 2 of us with interview sessions. Possible, we might have single speaker episodes in the future as well as we are experimenting how to best deliver value to the listeners.
If you have any suggestion for relevant topics, proposals for interesting interview guests, or other comments on the show, please contact us at alexander@theeffectivestatistician.com or benjamin@theeffectivestatistician.com.
Behind the scenes: Reine Escalona
Reine studied multimedia and arts and got really interested in doing graphics design and multimedia production in 2007 at Mapua Institute of Technology and Phoenix One in Manila. In 2011, with expertise in digital audio and visual media, the products she made were designed to entertain, educate, persuade or inform the audience. She brings text, photos, graphics, animation, and sound together to make a media-based product that can be delivered online and offline.
In 2013, she continued to work in project management, e-commerce, and digital marketing and she was responsible for planning, implementing, managing, and monitoring the company’s Social Media strategy in order to increase brand awareness, improve marketing efforts and increase sales. She also helped with a lot of administrative roles such as the creation of presentations and sales materials and collaborating with writers, artists, and designers.
In 2015, as a Team Leader, she managed a number of Virtual Assistants and clients in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Asia through online platforms.
In 2018, she became an SEO specialist. She was responsible for analyzing, reviewing, and implementing websites that are optimized to be picked up by search engines, developing content to include keywords or phrases in order to increase traffic to the website, conduct various testing methods in design, layout and advertising techniques in order to gain the most organic and paid traffic.
Currently, here in The Effective Statistician, she gets involved in podcast production and management, social media management, and website management.
Besides the challenging job, she is a wife and a mom. Whenever she has spare time, she volunteers and do preaching work, and sometimes play musical instruments. She also love reading and researching.
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