Structural Biology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics EVOLUTION OF THE SYNUCLEIN PROTEINS: ORPHANS OR SUPERFAMILY MEMBERS

LISA 2020: CREATING A NETWORK OF STATISTICAL COLLABORATION LABORATORIES. Eric Vance, Department of Statistics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg VA 24061. To increase the global impact of statistics as a discipline useful for helping researchers answer research questions, and sponsored by a Google Research Award, LISA—The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis at Virginia Tech—is partnering with universities and individuals around the world to create a network of 20 new statistical collaboration laboratories in developing countries by 2020. LISA and its partners will educate and train statisticians from developing countries to communicate and collaborate with nonstatisticians and then support these statisticians to create statistical collaboration laboratories in their home countries to help researchers, government officials, local industries, and NGOs apply statistical thinking and data science to make better decisions through data. At LISA and elsewhere, we will unlock the collaborative potential of technically sound statisticians who will in turn unlock the research potential of their collaborators and teach other statisticians to do likewise. These local research collaborations, now with the power of statistical thinking and data science open to them, will be key to improving human welfare worldwide. This talk will focus on the steps of the LISA 2020 plan, including how LISA trains statisticians to become interdisciplinary collaborators, how statistical collaboration laboratories create knowledge, and how we are building a mentoring network to assist statisticians in developing countries to enable and accelerate research by making statistics more practical in solving real world problems.