Source: SYSU-JHU Collaboration Program
Written by: Zhou Qian
Translated by: Chen Jingxue
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On June 3, 2015, the 6th SYSU Clinical Research Salon was held in the Reception Room on North Campus, attracting more than 100 doctors, teachers as well as medical students. Hosted by Prof. Chao Cheng and Prof. Yan Guo, the salon invited Prof. Xueqin Wang from the School of Mathematics and Computational Science and Ms. Jieying Ge from Sun Yan-sen University Cancer Center to share their expertise in their professional fields.

As a professional research nurse working at the Cancer Center, Ms. Jieying Ge shared the hospital’s valuable experience in training clinical research coordinators. Since the concept of research coordinator is still fairly new in China, Ms. Ge not only introduced the coordinator’s job responsibilities, but also demonstrated the close relations between successful clinical researches and the training of clinical research coordinators.
Prof. Xueqin Wang introduced the statistical methodologies and strategies in selecting variables. It is worth noting that Prof. Wang has long been focused on the methodology study of variable selection and has developed a series of profound insights on popular variable selection methods such as LASSO and Random Forest. He is the executive director of SYSU’s Southern China Research Center of Statistical Science and also a professor of Zhongshan School of Medicine. Consequently, he has applied statistical methodologies to clinical researches and successfully resolved a number of statistical problems in clinical researches. In the salon, Prof. Wang introduced one of the popular statistical methodologies: LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selectionator Operator). It has been proved that LASSO is a more accurate model in classifying esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients. In addition, Prof. Wang also introduced to the audience the Southern China Research Center of Statistical Science and its training programs (http://scrcss.sysu.edu.cn/do/list.php?f=1&fid=42).

SYSU Clinical Research Salon is an academic activity initiated by the visiting fellows of the SYSU-JHU Collaboration Program. They hope that the salon can bring the advanced study method and positive research atmosphere to SYSU and serve as a bridge to connect all the faculty members who are interested in clinical research. The academic salon is scheduled to take place on the first Wednesday of every month. Online videos of the salons are also available on the website: http://lecture.sysu.edu.cn/. For latest salon announcement, you may visit the webpage on SYSU North Campus website: http://med.sysu.edu.cn/ztbd/sysuhz/index.htm.