It’s not easy to leave a brilliant group of people you’ve worked with for almost a decade, but in a month’s time I’ll be moving on from the Royal Statistical Society (RSS).
When I joined RSS in June 2014 I was looking for new challenges. I wanted to find out more about the ways statistics and data are used to understand and solve problems and inform decisions in science, business and industry, public policy, health… I could go on! Working for the RSS certainly delivered on that front: as editor of Significance for eight years and of Real World Data Science more recently, I have had many opportunities to learn.
Pretty much every day of my working life for the past nine years, eight months or so involved speaking with expert statisticians and data scientists or reading about their work. When there were things I didn’t understand, they were always happy to explain. When I shared my ideas for how to make their articles clearer or more readable, they took the time to listen. Together, we worked to create accessible, engaging stories about statistics and data. There have been hundreds of these collaborations over the years – too many to namecheck individually – but I have enjoyed them all, and I’ve learned something from each of them.
Before I head off to pursue a new set of challenges and learning opportunities, I want to say a big thank you to all the RSS staff and members, past and present, that I’ve been lucky to call my colleagues. Thank you also to the staff and members of the American Statistical Association who have been valued partners on Significance over the years and now RWDS too. It’s been a privilege to work with you all.
The chance to launch RWDS has been a particular highlight of my time at RSS, and I am grateful to have had the support and input of The Alan Turing Institute and many of its wonderful staff and researchers on this project. I’m excited to see the site continue to grow and develop into a valuable resource for the data science community, and I look forward to reading an upcoming series of articles that will explore the statistical and data science perspectives on AI – stay tuned for more on this soon.
Statistics and data will continue to be a big part of my life, so this isn’t “goodbye.” Instead, I’ll just say, let’s keep in touch – and thank you for reading!
- Copyright and licence
- © 2024 Royal Statistical Society
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International licence. Thumbnail photo by Pete Pedroza on Unsplash.
- How to cite
- Tarran, Brian. 2024. “Editor’s note: Not saying goodbye, just saying…” Real World Data Science, March 6, 2024. URL