Our Aim

The Statistical Laboratory offers a free, walk-in statistical consulting service to all members of the broader research community within the University of Cambridge (and its affiliated institutes and hospitals) through our clinic. Our idea is to keep the threshold to participation as low as possible: everyone is invited to attend, regardless of their fields and statistical skills. Our services range from statistical advice to new methodology development. We will also be very interested in discussing potential academic collaborations and possible joint projects with our clients.

Students taking statistics courses should understand that this is NOT a teaching/supervision service.

We sincerely hope that our service will help you make progress in your research. We also hope that sometimes our discussion might evolve into genuine scientific collaboration, but in many cases a small acknowledgement in your paper of our assistance will be fine.

How to Participate

To attend the clinic, find a session here and register. Registration will typically open 6 days before the session takes place and close 2 days before the session. You will need to provide your name and email address, and you will need to specify whether you would like an in-person session (recommended) or a remote session. We only use your personal information to get in touch and confirm your booking. You will also need to provide a brief description of your problem, keywords, software you are using, etc. This will help us assign a suitable helper according to your request. Please be patient if you have not heard from us since you registration, as we usually send out confirmation/waitlist emails on the morning of the clinic session or the day before. Remote consultations will be carried out over Skype, Teams or Zoom, depending on your and your helper's preference. 

It is often helpful to bring a laptop to the clinic with you, especially if you need to present data, codes, outputs and/or domain-specific background material to the helper.

Each consultation will usually last 45 minutes and consist of the following steps:

1. You will be first asked to briefly describe your project to your helper. Some clients prefer to use slides to introduce the background, but this is not necessary. You will also be asked to show the data (if any) so that our helper can get a better understanding of the task. Please have the data file and a summary of your data ready on the laptop.
2. Your helper will discuss with you the questions you bring along. Please have a list of questions ready (in a text file or written down on a paper).
3. You should aim to wrap up your discussion before the end of the clinic session. Discuss with your helper if you would like to return to the next clinic session, or you want this to evolve into a genuine academic collaboration, or you would like to find a more specialised expert.

If you know your work requires expertise knowledge in a particular area of statistics, please also let us know in advance and we will accommodate your need as best as we can. You may find our areas of expertise here.

Our Services

Here is the scope of services we provide:

	Advice Help our clients understand how to formulate their problems in a more precise and abstract way. Point our clients to books, papers and software packages that might help them with their work.
	Analysis Apply appropriate statistical tools to highlight the most useful information from the data.  Help our clients analyse the results they have obtained and interpret them in context.
	Research Show our clients novel, cutting edge methods that may be used to understand data better, make more precise predictions and test hypotheses more reliably. Get our clients in contact with other researchers in Cambridge and beyond, who specialise in their particular type of problem.