Biomedical Statistician Visits IB Math 12

Earlier this week, Mr. Pat Giommi welcomed a special guest speaker to his IB Mathematics: Analysis and Approaches (SL) 12 class. Joining the class via Google Meet was Biomedical Statistician Jatinder Singh, who talked about his academic background and his career conducting data analysis for drug trials. “We have just wrapped up our probability and statistics unit with our DP 12 students,” said Mr. Giommi. “I thought bringing Jatinder in to talk about what he does as a statistician would be appropriate, especially in light of the COVID vaccine developments.” Jatinder spoke at length about his experience with clinical drug trials, and relayed his understanding regarding the trial periods for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. “They’re [the students] about to start their Math Explorations (Internal Assessments – IA), which is their major mathematics paper for the year, and a lot of them choose to focus it on statistics and probability,” Mr. Giommi continued. “So it was great for the students to hear first-hand how statistics factor into something like a drug trial.” Between the mathematics and science curriculum offered at GNS, the students get plenty of exposure to the scientific method, which prepares them well for the upcoming IA project. An IA is an individual assessment evaluated by the subject teacher with a list of criteria and is usually focused on some subject-related work. Alongside the criteria, samples of the student’s work are also submitted to the IB. “Students have been exposed to data. They’ve learned about bias, sampling and distributions so having an expert speak to us was a nice way to bring it all together,” added Mr. Giommi. Thank you to Jatinder Singh of Primary Biostatistical Solutions for all the knowledge he presented to our class!