Biostatistician/Statistical Programmer

Name (Company): 

Emma McEntee (PAREXEL)

Current role:

Biostatistician II

Years of relevant experience:

1 year industry placement as part of BSc

4 year industry experience post MSc

Emma M

Career path to date:

I studied BSc Mathematics at University of Greenwich with an industrial placement in 2012, so I graduated in 2013. I studied MSc Medical Statistics at London School of Tropical Medicine and graduated in 2015.

I am currently working as a Biostatistician II at PAREXEL, after finding my job on LinkedIn. I have been at the company for nearly 2 years, after working for a smaller CRO for the first 2 years after graduating from my MSc. As part of my role I am currently the lead biostatistician on 2 clinical studies.

In 5 years’ time, I hope to be considered a senior statistician leading more clinical studies and being considered a statistical expert so I can provide input into more complex statistical issues.

A typical day at work:

A typical working day involves attending meetings, sending emails (internal and clients) and overseeing the biostatistics and programming activities on my studies.

My degree is very relevant to my job. Most pharmaceutical companies & CROs require at least a MSc in Statistics to work as a statistician. I chose to specialise in Medical Statistics as I knew I wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry after completing my industrial placement year so this gave me specialist training in statistics used in this industry.

The best part of the role:

I enjoy knowing that the work I am doing will hopefully one day make a difference in someone’s life by helping get a drug to market.

Sometimes, as part of my role I can be faced with some interesting challenges… A client can request complex statistical analyses to be performed that I may not yet have experience with, so I have to do research and look into methodologies so I can deliver this to the client. Also working in a mutli-functional team, not everyone is familiar with understanding statistics so part of my job is coaching others and interpreting the results of any statistical analyses in a way that is understandable to those without any statistics knowledge.

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