BIBiostatistician
BI
Career

Biostatistician

By the numbers
Typical pay
$105,650 / yr
Education to start
Master's degree
Future demand
+8.5% by 2034
People in this job
29K
Figures shown for ·closest of 2 O*NET occupations
The work
A day, hour by hour
08:30
Data triage

Pull overnight trial data exports; flag missing values and obvious outliers fast.

09:00
Team sync

Quick check-in with researchers — what's blocked, what's due to the FDA this week.

09:20
Dataset scrubbing

Write R scripts to catch duplicate records and coding errors before they skew results.

11:00
Model building

Fit a survival model to patient outcome data; decide if the shape is right or forced.

13:00
Clinician debrief

Translate hazard ratios into plain language the trial doctors can actually act on.

14:00
Study design review

Recalculate sample size for a new trial arm — does 200 patients give a real answer?

15:30
Regulatory check

Audit the analysis plan against FDA guidance before the submission package goes out.

16:30
Manuscript work

Draft the statistical methods section and results tables for a co-authored journal paper.

Things you do
  • Build statistical models to find patterns in medical trial data.
  • Design clinical trials so results are trustworthy and unbiased.
  • Calculate how many patients a study needs to get a real answer.
  • Write code in R, SAS, or Python to crunch thousands of data points.
  • Explain statistical findings to doctors who aren't math experts.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Is this pattern in the data a real effect, or just noise?
  • Should I flag this data anomaly to the research team, or clean it and move on?
  • Is my current statistical model the right fit, or am I forcing the data into the wrong shape?
  • Do I simplify these results enough for the clinicians to act on them, or risk losing important nuance?
  • Is this study designed well enough to actually answer the question it's asking?
Education Pathways · how you get there
101 in 100 went the college route · 0 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET:
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