Why Me?
I'm a tenured professor of biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I learned to write papers the way most researchers do: by writing one after another until the thinking came on its own. No one handed me a process. I worked out the decisions behind a convincing paper slowly, by trial and error, learning how much rode on an argument clear enough that no one could wave it away. Years later, I watched my own mentees struggle to reach the same decisions, the same slow way.
I did what no one had done for me. Over a decade in my lab, I worked the thinking out step by step, until what had taken me years to learn became the method I teach now.
The method works. My mentees have won their own grants as principal investigators, published in the top journals in their fields, and landed tenure-track faculty positions; across thirty-four of them, the achievements now number more than seventy. Many arrived certain they weren't strong writers, and left generating and defending their own ideas without me. When some of them caught an error running through three published papers by senior researchers, they said so, in print, and a new direction in my own research grew out of what they found.
The recognition followed. I'm a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and my mentoring has been honored with the National Institutes of Health's Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship and the Carolina Women's Leadership Council Faculty Mentoring Award from.
Teaching the thinking takes more than knowing how to write. As a professor and certified coach, I've spent my career learning how to help people reach the thinking themselves. The method comes from my own research and writing. The coaching is how I help you and your mentees make it your own.
