When you help write up a research grant, you need to brag about how smart and talented you are. I am not shy about promoting myself, so this is pretty easy for me to do. Here’s the text I included in a recent research grant. I put these here not just to brag about myself, but to help provide material that people can use to introduce me when I give talks. I also recycle and update these brag sheets over time.
Co-Principal Investigator: Steve Simon, Ph.D. will serve as co-principal investigator. Dr. Simon will oversee the data collection, management, and analysis. He will review all procedures to ensure that they are statistically valid and that they produce reproducible results. Dr. Simon has a PhD in Statistics with 38 years of experience in academia, government, and medicine. Dr. Simon has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has been funded on twelve different research grants. He is regularly invited to give training classes at regional, national, and international research conferences for Andrology, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Medical Librarians, and Pediatrics. He developed a website and blog with over 1,700 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. First, Dr. Simon regularly co-taught training classes for industrial hygienists while working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health during the 1990s. This included discussion of many topics related to the statistical models proposed in the grant, such as how to analyze log-normal data and how to handle observations below the limit of detection. Second, 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. Third, he 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.