Events of the Statistics Communication section are organised by its board members and other volunteers.
Sanne Willemsis Assistant Professor in the Methodology & Statistics Unit at Leiden University. She studies effective ways of communicating statistics and their uncertainties to improve data-driven decision making. Furthermore, she strives to improve (statistical) numeracy in society and to create more awareness for this topic. To this aim, she co-founded the Statistics Communication section of the VVSOR and its society’s statistics blog, initiated a reading group on the topic, and engages in various outreach activities.
Laura Verbeekis a master student in three programs: Biology and Animal Sciences in Wageningen, and Statistical Science in Leiden. After a bachelors’ in Biology in Leiden she decided to focus more on mathematics. She was always interested in science communication and writing for a wider audience, and for a course on Science Journalism she interviewed Sanne about the communication section. After that interview, she never left again.
Ruben Vromansis an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. His research focuses on risk and data communication in healthcare. More specifically, he studies (1) how people think about health risks and how those thoughts influence their health-related decisions and behavior, and (2) how healthcare professionals can best communicate such complex risk information in order to help people make sense of their personalized health risks data and act in ways that benefit their health.
Saar Hommesis in her last year of her PhD at Tilburg University and the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organization (IKNL). In her research, she deploys natural language generation techniques to convert prediction models to (simple) text that is understandable for patients suffering from severe injuries and cancer patients. Where in high school she was a bit scared of mathematics, she now tries to convince others that statistics isn’t scary and everyone can grow to love it!
Nikky van Buuren– board member
holds a master’s degree in Statistical Science (Leiden University). In previous jobs she worked on developing network models, calculation and simulation of financial risks, and programming codes for machine learning frameworks. Nikky is now a Data Scientist for her own company Nidasci, where communication on statistical models is of major importance.
Nynke Krol – board member
is statistical researcher at Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek). She holds a master’s degree in Statistical Science (Leiden University), and is former chair of the Young Statisticians. While her day-to-day focus is more on computer languages, a tweet of her brother sparked her interest in the interpretability of human language, and statistics communication.
Dr. Aysun Cetinyurek-Yavuz – workshop committee
Aysun is a senior statistician working at Danone Nutricia Research. She is responsible for the design, analysis and interpretation of the results of clinical trials where communicating statistics is the core of her daily work. She holds a PhD degree in Mathematics, orientation in Bayesian statistics (University of Liège). She worked on Bayesian Cox proportional hazards and frailty models during her PhD.
Prof.dr. Jacqueline Meulman – sponsor symposium 2018
Jacqueline is Professor of Applied Statistics at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. She is a past president of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research.
Photo by Marc de Haan.