Welcome to my first Chair's update! I’m not sure where the first 12 weeks has gone, but as always with PSI you can guarantee it’s been jam packed with exciting content, community spirit and great ideas! As well as the PSI updates, I wanted to share with you a book and quote that have stuck with me this quarter.

Membership: We’re now at 969 full members, Wow! When we include students/teachers, honary members and reduced rate members we’re up at 1159! I am also excited that Tim Rolfe (GSK) has now officially put a membership committee together from across the globe to help us build on the success we have seen over the last year with an increase in membership. Go team!

Video on Demand: With over 180 videos online and with 34 of these containing content on Estimands, why not block 1 hour out of your calendar next week and invest in learning something new, utilising the content on our VoD platform which is free to all PSI members.

European SIGs: PSI SIGs have been running in collaboration with EFSPI for a number of years. To help simplify the naming of the SIGs and to show the reach they have, EFSPI recommended a renaming to European SIGs and the PSI board have approved this rebrand. SIGs are still open to anyone interested, even if you are from outside Europe. If you’d like to get involved please check out the SIG website. A big thank you to Adam Crisp (GSK) for his leadership and coordination of the SIGs to date.

Communications: The communications team are also building in numbers, with some new sub-groups set-up to support conference, eNEWs and to make sure we are making the most of understanding our own analytics across different platforms e.g. website, LinkedIN. Alexander Schacht (UCB) has some great ideas to move our communication strategy forward and I’m excited about what is to come!  

Strategy Day: We’ve been thinking hard about how to set PSI up for future success and one area we have been working on is understanding what the world of statistics in healthcare will look like in the next 5 – 10 years, so we can make sure our strategy can best support members as the world of data becomes more and more complex. If you have thoughts or ideas around this topic we’d love to hear from you, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

American Statistical Association Biopharm section: I spoke at a ASA Biop board meeting recently about potential opportunities for us to collaborate across organisations to leverage the broad networks and skills we have to offer statisticians. We are still finalising where the collaborations make most sense, but both organisations are keen to partner and I’m enthusiastic about what is to come.

Australia: On the 2^nd October we hosted a free webinar with ABPG (Australian Pharmaceutical Biostatistics Group) on “Effective Insight Communication”, this is the first of what we hope will be many opportunities to share knowledge and speakers across the globe. If you missed the webinar the content will be on the Video On Demand platform shortly.  

Canada: For Canada we have a slightly different model and Colin Neate (Roche Canada) is putting together a local country group to help build a community of statisticians in the area and promote the online offerings PSI has. If you’re based in Canada and would like to get involved, please let me know and I can link you with Colin or if you’re based in a country and would like to set something similar up yourself please let me know. David Lawrence (Novartis) is going to support country groups to share our learnings and help make them successful. Thanks David! 

Book recommendation: Lean in. Women, work and the will to lead by Sheryl Sandberg:

At 173 pages this is a nice short read. The book is a great insight into how to develop more women leaders and how both  genders can be equally biased to improving the chances of equality in senior leadership positions. While I personally felt  this book would have most impact to women starting out in their careers, there were many helpful insights to men and  women at any stage of their career. There are a number of areas I will be taking forward myself in my own company.

 Leadership is something I feel passionate about, particularly encouraging people at any stage of their careers to show  strong leadership and the importance of different types of leadership opportunities for individuals outside of management.  This quote on leadership in Sheryl’s book particular stood out to me as something we should all be striving to achieve  whomever we are.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence - Quote by Sheryl Sandberg