A bit about Nicole's work

Family and friends always ask what I do for a living. The short answer is I am a Statistician, or a Researcher, for Battelle which is a nonprofit research institute. The long answer may include general discussion about environmental and immunological projects I regularly support; I might also tell you about looking at how a lottery can increase sales or how many short trips an average amercican takes in a car, bus, by foot, etc per day. But its always all over the place and at the end I nearly always asked "So what exactly do YOU do?"

Sometimes I think the poor people who really are interested in how I spend 50 hours of my week find it confusing because I (and my company and group) research so many things. Sometimes its confusing because I'm not really at liberty to say, much less type, exactly what I do. Sometimes its confusing because the interesting part of my work is the problem at large, not the computer programing in SAS that takes up 75% of my day.

BUT, today you are lucky. You get to peruse some of my work. I was grabbing a report today that a coworker down the hall wrote that is available on a public, government, website and noticed that I had something on there! (This link requires Adobe Reader, and its a bit large, so be patient... its worth the troube to see my name even appear as a co-author!)

So what is this stuff that I'm linking you to? Its from the National Childrens Study which is a very large proposed study that will be run by the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Portection Agency to name a few. The document I linked you to is just a very small portion of the background research that has been done to plan the study. It gives an idea of how many doors the study will need to knock on to enroll enough women willing to be followed BEFORE they get pregnant (or even want to be pregnant) to end up with 100,000 infants who are born within 3 to 5 years of each other to follow for another 20 years.

I spend nearly half of my time on a contract supporting this children's study. If you want to know more about it, there are a group of web pages that I, with the help of co-workers, put together to tell you about some of the hypotheses this gigantic study would look at. Take a look at this page and the hyperlinks associated with it.

Also, I make a lot of pretty graphs for this study, so hopefully some of those will soon be publically available so you can see my math artwork!