Workshops

ASC2025 will feature three in-depth workshops, available to conference attendees for an additional fee. These workshops cover both technical and professional development topics, offering valuable insights and practical skills for statisticians and data professionals at all career stages.

Workshop registration will open soon – stay tuned for updates

An ASC2025 Workshop: Coaching for Mentoring Success

📅 30 November 2025 11 AM -4PM (AWST) | 📍 In-person

Mentoring is about more than offering guidance—it is about helping students unlock their potential and achieve their own goals.

In this short course, participants will work through exercises in active listening, asking open-ended questions and coaching in ways that foster student independence.

Through interactive activities, you will learn how to give feedback that is truly heard and how to partner with students to support their growth without directing their path.

By the end of the session, participants will walk away with practical tools to create mentoring experiences that drive student success.

Presenter: A/Prof Tanya P. Garcia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

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An ASC2025 Workshop: Introduction to Response Adaptive Randomization

📅 30 November 2025 11AM - 5 PM (AWST) | 📍 In-person

This full-day course provides a practical, hands-on introduction to Response Adaptive Randomization (RAR), starting with theoretical foundations before moving into real-world applications.

The course will cover:

• How to implement and compare different RAR designs in practice

• Key considerations for targeting optimal allocation proportions

• Advanced methodological topics such as early stopping and statistical estimation

• Applications in rare disease settings and dose-finding studies

• A detailed case study of the ARREST trial

Through a mix of lectures and practical sessions (including use of an R Shiny app), participants will gain the skills and knowledge to understand, implement, and critically evaluate RAR designs. This course is ideal for statisticians, methodologists, and clinical trial professionals seeking to enhance their expertise in innovative trial design.

Presenter: A/Prof Sofia S. Villar - MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, UK

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An ASC2025 Workshop: Introduction to R Packages

📅 30 Nov 2025, 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM (AWST) 📍 In-person

Do you have R code you’d like to share more widely? This workshop will show you how to transform your R code into a shareable tool by developing it into an R package. Designed for those curious about package development but unsure where to begin, this course bridges the gap between writing standalone functions and building documented, distributable packages.

You’ll explore the essential tools of the trade: usethis and devtools for package structure, roxygen2 for documentation, testthat for testing, and Git/GitHub for sharing your work. Whether you want to better organise your own code or contribute to the broader R ecosystem, this workshop provides the foundations to get started.

Prerequisites

  • Comfortable with R fundamentals (data types, functions, reading data).

  • Experience writing basic R scripts.

  • No prior experience with package development required.

Learning Outcomes

  • By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Create the basic structure of an R package.

  • Manage dependencies with usethis and devtools.

  • Document code with roxygen2.

  • Write and run unit tests with testthat.

  • Use Git and GitHub to publish packages online.

  • Take first steps towards advanced development, including:

    • Continuous integration with GitHub Actions.

    • Making packages easily installable via R Universe.

    • Building package websites with pkgdown.

Presenter: Dr Nicholas (Nick) Tierney