Monika M. Wahi, MPH, CPH, is a well-published data scientist with more than 20 years of experience, and president of the public health informatics and education firm DethWench Professional Services (DPS) (www.dethwench.com). She is the author of Mastering SAS Programming for Data Warehousing and has coauthored over 35 peer-reviewed scientific articles. After obtaining her master of public health degree in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, she has served many roles at the intersection of study design, biostatistics, informatics, and research in the public and private sectors, including at Hennepin County Department of Corrections in Minneapolis, the Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute in Tampa, and the U.S. Army. After founding DPS, she worked as an adjunct lecturer at Laboure College in the Boston area for several years, teaching about the U.S. healthcare system and biostatistics in their bachelor of nursing program. At DPS, she helps organizations upgrade their analytics pipelines to take advantage of new research approaches, including open source. She also coaches professionals moving into data science from healthcare and other fields on research methods, applied statistics, data governance, informatics, and management.
John C. Pezzullo, PhD, spent more than half a century working in the physical, biological, and social sciences. For more than 25 years, he led a dual life at Rhode Island Hospital as an information technology programmer/analyst (and later director) while also providing statistical and other technical support to biological and clinical researchers at the hospital. He then joined the faculty at Georgetown University as informatics director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Perinatology Research Branch. He created the StatPages website (https://statpages.info), which provides online statistical calculating capability and other statistics-related resources.
This book is dedicated to my favorite “dummy,” my dear old dad, Bhupinder Nath “Ben” Wahi. He is actually a calculus whiz. He used to point to the For Dummies books when we’d see them at the bookstore and say, “Am I a dummy?” Of course, I won’t answer that! — Monika
First and foremost, I want to acknowledge and honor the late Dr. John Pezzullo, the original author of this work. It has been a pleasure to revise his thorough and interesting writing, delivered with the enthusiasm of a true educator. I am also extremely grateful for Matt Wagner of Fresh Books, who opened the doors necessary for my coauthorship of this book. Further, I am indebted to editor Katharine Dvorak for her constant support, guidance, and helpfulness through the writing process. Additionally, I want to extend a special “thank you” to my amazing colleague, Sunil Gupta, who provided his typically excellent technical review. Finally, I want to express my appreciation for all the other members of the For Dummies team at Wiley who helped me along the way to make this book a success. Thank you for helping me be the best writer I can be! — Monika
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
Executive Editor: Lindsay Berg
Managing Editor: Murari Mukundan
Project Editor: Katharine Dvorak
Technical Editor: Sunil K. Gupta, Founder of R-Guru.com and SASSavvy.com
Production Editor: Pradesh Kumar
Cover Image: © ArtemisDiana/Shutterstock