I may be working with a consulting group, Mountain Whisper Light, on a grant proposal to be sent to the Department of Natural Resources in the state of Washington. I don’t know too many details yet, but I was asked to send a resume and a brief description of what I do.
Whenever I get requests like this, I store them on my website so I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. It also doesn’t hurt for others to see all the wonderful skills and talents I have.
I recycle and update these brag sheets over time. For this page, I’m borrowing heavily from a 2020 blog post.
My resume is in pdf format on my github site. There is a long version and a short version, but I can revise it easily to whatever format is needed. I also have a biosketch in a format required for grant submissions to the National Institutes of Health. Consult the readme page for details.
Dr. Simon has a PhD in Statistics with 40 years of experience in academia, government, and medicine. Dr. Simon has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has been funded on nineteen different research grants. He is regularly invited to give training classes at regional, national, and international research conferences for Andrology, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Library Science, and Pediatrics. He developed a website and blog with over 2,000 pages on topics in Statistics, Research Ethics, and Evidence-Based Medicine (www.pmean.com, blog.pmean.com).
While Dr. Simon’s research expertise is very broad, three areas relevant to this grant are worth noting: reproducible research, research design, data visualization.
Reproducible research
Dr. Simon has extensive experience teaching the methods of reproducible research in his Introduction to SQL, Introduction to R, and Introduction to SAS classes. In particular, he stresses the importance of documentation, data dictionaries, and other good programming practices in these classes.
Research design
Dr. Simon is familiar with research design, including how to insure methodological rigor in research studies where randomization is not possible. He teaches a class on research methodology to graduate students in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at UMKC, gives regular talks on Evidence-Based Medicine, and has written a book on the critical appraisal of research studies, Statistical Evidence in Clinical Trials, published by Oxford University Press.
Data visualization
Dr. Simon has given numerous lectures on data visualization, covering the proper use of color, Gestalt principles for highlighting patterns, and how modifying the aspect ratio of a graph can enhance the perception of trends. He is developing a course on data visualization for his students that would include programming tips in Python, R, and Tableau. He is the principal investigator on a research grant on lead poisoning that uses extensive mapping capabilities for identifying neighborhood housing conditions. He also supervised a Master’s degree thesis on extrapolating data from Census geographies (tracts, block groups) to neighborhoods and community districts.