West Virginia University

Dr. Gerald Hobbs is Associate Professor of Statistics at West Virginia University and a member of the Community Medicine faculty at the WVU School of Medicine. In his Applied Biostatistics and Statistical Methods courses, students use JMP software and JMP exercises provided in the course textbook, Introduction to the Practice of Statistics, authored by Moore and McCabe and published by W.H. Freeman & Co.

"JMP does almost every statistical analysis I teach," said Dr. Hobbs. "JMP is easy to learn and provides a graphical interface that makes it easy for students to perform the correct analysis. The resulting graphical displays are simple to interpret and add a level of excitement to biostatistics. One graph is worth a thousand words, plus all the statistical values appear in the same window as the supporting graphs."

Many of Dr. Hobbs' students access databases commonly used in the public health disciplines they are studying. JMP reads all ODBC-compliant data provided by public health agencies. For example, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a national data collection system coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provides biostatisticians information about health risk factors known to contribute to or increase the risk of chronic and communicable disease, acute illness, injury, disability and premature death.

BRFSS provides all its information in SAS format, and many of Dr. Hobbs' students also use SAS. "The BRFSS huge data repository is invaluable to students and practitioners alike," said Dr. Hobbs. "In many cases, we very effectively use powerful SAS tools to extract data from the BRFSS, import the data directly into JMP, and then analyze the data using JMP’s desktop, graphical analytics."