Vanderbilt-Nigeria Biostatistics Training Program (VN-BioStat)

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PROJECT ABSTRACT It is critical to build biostatistics capacity in West Africa. Biomedical HIV research is growing in West Africa, but biostatistical support and expertise are lagging. In collaborative HIV studies between West Africa and U.S. institutions, the biostatistics leaders are almost always from the U.S. It is important to develop biostatistics leaders in West Africa – biostatisticians who will not be technicians, but co-investigators, principal investigators, and thought-leaders in funded HIV/AIDS research. There are several statistics PhD programs in West Africa, but they often have little or no connection with biomedical research. Funded training initiatives over the past ten years have been successful at building biostatistics in Southern Africa and East Africa, but no such programs currently exist in West Africa. The Vanderbilt-Nigeria Biostatistics Training Program (VN-BioStat) builds on long-standing collaborations between two leading research institutions in Nigeria and the United States, namely, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Vanderbilt) to establish a research and training platform for biostatisticians doing HIV-related research in Nigeria. VN-BioStat will build upon the resources of AKTH and its parent institution, Bayero University in Kano (BUK), to create a cohort of highly skilled Nigerian biostatisticians with the capacity to lead and supervise biostatistical activities in West Africa. VN-BioStat leverages the highly successful, collaborative and rapidly expanding portfolio of U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funded research at AKTH, with joint leadership from Vanderbilt investigators. To train biostatistician leaders in Nigeria, the VN-BioStat program proposes to bring two Nigerian data scientists per year (total of 10 over 5 years) to Vanderbilt to immerse them in biostatistics and to receive hands on training. During the one-year training period, trainees will lead the design, analysis, and publication of a collaborative research project using HIV data from AKTH. They will also lead a related, methodologically focused project that will culminate in a publication. While at Vanderbilt, they will interact with a team of HIV biostatisticians, take appropriate biostatistics courses (up to 8 credit hours per semester for 2 semesters), attend biostatistics and global health seminars, participate in a grant-writing workshop, attend biostatistics clinics, and collaborate with other Nigerian investigators. They will receive mentorship from Vanderbilt faculty (one biostatistician and one clinical investigator) and AKTH faculty. We will also conduct annual workshops in Nigeria to provide mid- level biostatistics training for up to 25 HIV researchers. Potential course topics include methods to address missing data, introduction to causal inference, regression modeling strategies, big data in biomedical research, and survival analysis.