Hi there,
First of all, a big welcome to the Foundations Course. You are now officially a student at the GCR Academy!
I’m really excited to work with you on a strong foundation for an excellent understanding of research methodology and statistics. You will notice that my approach to this topic will be somewhat unconventional. That’s because I believe that a change is direly needed to break the spell of the current reproducibility crisis in science. Researchers have become too fixed on finding associations through significance testing, without having a good understanding of what the statistical tests used actually do, and how the results are influenced by study design choices. I have spent more than a year working on this course for you, using all the spare time I could find when not working in the hospital. I used all the insights that I gathered during my second masters study in clinical epidemiology (a 2 year long post-graduate course costing about €20.000), from the many interactions with countless PhD students to seasoned research professors, and from examining all the educational articles and text books that I could get my hands on. The whole reason to found GCR Statistics is that I really want to help fellow researchers get the most out of their research efforts. You could basically say that I’m trying to build an army of researchers that can create meaningful breakthroughs in clinical research. Thus, I do hope that this course brings you the value that I envisioned and that you want to join me in this mission. If you have any recommendations for improvement, found some kind of error in the course, have a request for a future lesson topic or maybe even have a recommendation for a brilliant teacher, please fill in our Survey. You can also send me an e-mail via our contact section. With your help, I can keep improving and updating this course for future students. If you did learn much from this course and want to support our mission, I would of course appreciate it if you would recommend the course and the GCR Statistics research tools to a friend or colleague.
In the next two sections of this introduction you can familiarise yourself with the content and structure of this course. Enjoy!
Yours Sincerely,
Andor van den Hoven
MD Phd MSc