ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how a collaborative statistician or data scientist who wants to have more positive impact on society can create a statistics and data science collaboration laboratory (“stat lab”), what such a stat lab does, and how stat labs can be created and sustained to become engines for development. Statistical analysis and data science have enormous potential for enabling and accelerating data-driven development, and stat labs can multiply this potential impact even further. We detail an example stat lab—the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis—and describe the path for stat labs to become strong and sustainable. Along this path, a virtuous cycle of development emerges in which initial collaborations build the capacity of all parties to achieve even more positive development outcomes, enabling the stat lab to achieve its extraordinary potential to apply statistics and data science to positively impact humanity.
