Collaborative Research in Statistics Departments

[Geococcyx]

I get the sense that part of the experience of being in a biostatistics department is the opportunity for lots of collaborative research -- collaborating with various biomedical research groups at your university, groups in other parts of a school of public health, and collaborating with other professors in your department on both those projects and on projects native to the biostatistics department.  Given the nature of large medical grants from the NIH/NHLBI, I understand that such collaborating is pretty much necessary, although it may be a cultural preference in those departments too.  

I am curious, then, at the extent of collaborative research that occurs in the standard statistics department.  Do statistics PhD students work much with professors who aren't their PhD advisers, excepting in statistical consulting centres/cores?  If students are working with non-adviser professors outside of specific consulting relationships, are those professors more likely to be in other departments (e.g. biology, hydrology, atmospheric sciences), or do PhD students also work on projects/publish papers with statistics professors who aren't their adviser?

I understand this is liable to vary a lot department-to-department, and given that I think most of the current and former graduate students who frequent this forum are/were in biostatistics departments, I'm dubious that I'll hear any anecdotes one way or another about this.  Even so, let me know if you do have any knowledge one way or another about this, and have a great weekend everyone!

[Stat Assistant Professor]

When I was a PhD student in a Statistics department, I collaborated with a few people in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering department and I knew another who did some work for the Nursing department. You will probably need to seek it out on your own, though, or volunteer to do it.

In my experience, the Graduate Coordinator or someone in another department will sometimes forward an email to the student listservs asking if any statistics grad students would be interested in doing statistical analysis, coding, plots, etc. This work will probably not count towards your PhD dissertation work but you will probably be listed as a third author on the paper that results from your work. A lot of Stat PhD students do not do this on their own volition though.

[Geococcyx]

Thank you!  Just to confirm, were any of these opportunities involving collaboration just within the statistics department, or did they all involve outside profs/departments?  It sounds like the latter.

[Stat Assistant Professor]

I did not personally write any first-author papers during my PhD except with only my PhD advisor. Some students did collaborate with other Statistics faculty besides their PhD advisors. For example, I know this has happened if one of the professors taught a PhD elective and asked the students to do class projects. In some cases, the professor thought a student's class project was good enough to be extended into a publishable paper -- one person I know got a Biometrics paper and a good postdoc out of a class project. 

I would not say that collaborative research between PhD students and non-advisor Statistics faculty was very common though (from my experience). If you wanted to collaborate with other faculty and students besides your PhD advisor, you probably could have though, but you'd have to actively take the initiative to ask.  I don't think most Stat faculty readily give research opportunities to students or postdocs whom they are not personally supervising, but it's possible that they might if you asked them. In my experience, it was more common for students to have two PhD co-advisors if they wanted to work with more than one professor.