I have been a professor of biostatistics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center since 1995. I joined the faculty of MD Anderson immediately after obtaining a PhD from the University of Washington and then fulfilling a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. After more than 20 years on the faculty at MD Anderson, I still find this job exciting because my work on multidisciplinary research teams contributes to preventing and detecting cancer and treating patients diagnosed with cancer. Besides developing new statistical methods, I am mostly engaged in the work of identifying optimal treatments and improving the quality of life for cancer patients. I have contributed to multidisciplinary research projects in breast cancer, bladder cancer and cancer prevention. Such team work requires the members of the team to use communication and interpersonal skills that are beyond their respective areas of expertise.

I started taking part in the JTOP programs in 2007. During the last decade, Dr. J. Jack Lee and I have taken turns serving as the statistician on the multidisciplinary team of mentors. When I first joined the team of mentors about 10 years ago, I was a bit surprised by the ambitious mission of the TeamOncology workshop: our mentees had only 2 days to learn all the necessary skills to draft a clinical protocol that could generate scientific evidence through multidisciplinary team work. It was very exciting and challenging for me too to simultaneously mentor four groups as the only statistician on the tasks. In the early years, the majority of our Japanese mentees were relatively inexperienced in working with statisticians in their research or daily work. Fortunately, by the second day of the workshop, the mentees started to learn the importance of having a statistician on their team.

As JTOP evolved over the years, I became keenly aware that we needed to enlist Japanese statisticians in the workshop to foster “real” collaborations between Japanese medical researchers and their local statisticians for ongoing research beyond the JTOP workshops. With help from our Japanese statistician colleagues, we have been fortunate to recruit Japanese statisticians to contribute to the workshops in more recent years by participating in the design of clinical studies as a member of the team. Through this process, we observed that our medical researchers became more and more appreciative of the insights from their statistician team members, who had been an indispensable part of the multidisciplinary team. Such collaborations and friendships with local statisticians often continue after the workshops end. Going forward, it is clear that the next generation of leaders in oncology should work closely with biostatisticians as members of multidisciplinary research teams to generate evidence-based medicine.