We have gathered various relevant information for you as a new employee or guest, but if you need other information, you can either read the welcome material (see below), take a look at the other menus at this staff portal, or you can search for it in the box 'Staff service at AU' to the right. You are also welcome to contact the staff in the FOOD Secretariat.
Find contact persons at FOOD here:
Message from Michelle Williams:
We have in 2020 formed a formal agreement between AU FOOD and AU-MATH, to support short statistical consultancies on design and analysis with their ‘aStatLab’.
Our goal here is to mostly to support advising and troubleshooting consultancies, linked to design and analysis approaches (as described under point #1 below).
I encourage anyone who is developing a new project which includes large amounts of data and data analysis to consider taking direct contact to the ‘aStatLab’, to determine if a statistician should be included in the project as a research collaborator. This way an agreement can be formed on the involvement of a statistician from research design, to analysis of data and co-authored papers. Note that larger data analysis and research collaborations fall outside the ‘consultancy agreement’ and should be funded directly in new projects.
Here is an introduction message from the ‘aStatLab’:
_____________________________________________________________________
Dear All,
It is a pleasure to announce that the Applied Statistics Laboratory (aStatLab) from the Department of Mathematics, AU, established an agreement of statistical support to FOOD.
This means that scientists, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Master students from FOOD can book an interview with a statistician from the aStatLab to resolve some statistical issues related to their work.
How it works:
The statistical support of the aStatLab to FOOD includes also the following additional activities (see the details bellow):
I am looking forward to meeting all of you – either online during Covid-19 or face-to-face when possible again.
Kind regards,
Rodrigo Labouriau
DETAILS ON THE STATISTICAL SUPPORT AGREEMENT
1 - STATISTICAL CONSULTATIONS
This activity consists of maintaining a system of statistical consultation to assist scientists, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Master students solving simple statistical issues that normally appear in their daily research activities.
How it works:
Details: A consultation here is a personal interview (1 to 2 hours) possibly complemented by a short follow-up (e.g., written or telephonic).
In many cases, the client performs the calculations, but often the statistician assists the client to actually do the analysis or perform the key calculations of the analyses.
It should not be expected that a consultation (including a follow-up) involves more than one workday of the statistician; if the activity requires more than one workday, then it should be treated as an ad-hoc mini-project or support to a project.
Only in exceptional cases the consultations will be made over telephone, Skype or e-mail.
Typical topics often observed in previous consultations were: identification of statistical and/or mathematical techniques required for answering specific research questions arrived from experiments, assistance in the way to actually performing concrete statistical analyses, counselling on strategies to plan experiments, second opinion or remedy solutions for rejected manuscripts with statistical issues and interpretation of non-standard or complex statistical models.
A consultation can also be used to initiate an ad-hoc mini project or to clarify some theoretical statistical questions.
2 - SHORT AD HOC INTERNAL PROJECTS
This activity consists of maintaining a system of statistical support to scientists, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Master students to solve statistical issues that appear in their research activities, which involves a workload of the order of magnitude of at most one week workload.
In this activity, a statistician from the aStatLab will perform the statistical work in collaboration with the client(s) from FOOD.
How it works:
3) STATISTICAL SUPPORT FOR PhD AND MASTER AT FOOD
This activity comprises in a follow-up of some individual PhD and Master programs at FOOD.
PhD and Master students can benefit from the statistical support covered by this agreement in several ways, namely: planning experiments, counselling regarding the statistical methods to be employed or studied, assistance in performing the statistical analysis etc.
These different activities cannot always be covered in a coordinated way via short consultations or short ad hoc projects; therefore, it is proposed to create some follow-up activities.
This activity should be confined to few cases and should be agreed and coordinated with the supervisor(s) of the PhD or Master student.
Holiday planning is made yearly at FOOD, and you will be notified about this in due course.
Read more about AU's holiday rules.
Remember to add holiday and time off in your Outlook calendar, so others can see when you are out of office.
The AU credit card can be used for purchases that are work-related.
Remember: