Overview

Biostatistics is a Division within the Department of Health Sciences Research and has had a distinguished history of methodological research and statistical collaboration at Mayo since 1929. The division is staffed by more than 140 statisticians (25 Ph.D., 50 M.S., 70 B.S.) as well as information technology and support staff. The Survey Research Center, founded in 1991, is part of the Division of Biostatistics and facilitates the conduct of surveys for Mayo investigators and also advances the science of survey research through methodological experimentation.

The staff collaborates with investigators from almost every medical specialty, with major commitments in such diverse areas as oncology, cardiology, neurology, endocrinology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, psychology, and epidemiology. In addition to general consulting on over 2,000 ongoing investigations, the staff provides core statistical support for a number of research efforts, especially in the areas of bioinformatics, survival analysis, clinical trials, survey research, statistical genetics, population research, and outcomes research.

The primary data analysis tools in the Division are SAS and S-Plus. These are augmented with other tools such as StatXact, SUDAAN, Data Conversion, R, WinBUGS, Matlab, and over 100 statistical genetics packages such as Solar, Merlin, and SAGE. The Division of Biostatistics has been a user of SAS since its 1972 release and has made significant contributions to the SAS software base, including many of the survival routines. Moreover, members of the Division have authored all of the survival analysis routines distributed in the S-Plus package and written S-Plus recursive partitioning and statistical genetic routines, all of which are publicly available. Routines developed for internal use include 10 SAS procedures, 7 S-Plus libraries each consisting of numerous functions, and over 250 SAS macros.