It has been a while since I last blogged. Even at this advanced age, I changed careers 10 years ago and now apply myself to virology and medical science. I have finally finished my long-held goal of completing a doctorate. Now, I conduct research on HIV and other viral diseases as well as teach biomedical and other students at the Federal University of São Paulo statistics and programming.
My focus remains quantitative methods, especially biostatistics, bioinformatics, and the computer programming necessary to answer fundamental–and sometimes trivial–questions related to disease. I teach annually a short course on using the computer language R to conduct medical research.
I’ve also had the privilege of consulting for a number of biotech companies in Brazil, the United States and Israel on research and drug development. Again, my focus is on the quantitative aspects of the research, although my decade of study of viruses, how they function and how to combat the diseases they cause form a large part of what I contribute to these research efforts.
What This Blog Will Be About
I would like to address three principal areas in this blog.
- What I am thinking about and working on related to the medical research projects that our laboratory is dealing with. There are many topics that come up that are not really germane to the academic publications that scientists use as their primary means of communications, but may be of interest to individuals and groups outside our team.
- Issues in biostatistics, probability and other subjects related to quantitative methods. These will include guides to understanding specific issues in statistical decision-making, use and abuse of statistical models, methods and tests, and general comments on mathematics. I will always try to keep the explanations I offer here understandable without requiring a Ph.D. just to read the blog.
- The computer languages and software we use to study biological data create many issues that are worthy of discussion. Although I have been an R language user for the last fifteen years, I will also explore other languages such as Python and Julia with which I am familiar. However, I promise there will be no posts on the tired “R vs Python” theme. I will also address from time to time the use of large, canned statistical analysis programs such as SPSS, Stata, Prism, etc.
I will write this blog as clearly and informally as I can. No need here for academically stiff prose. Frequently, it’s easier to make a point clearly with some lightness and humor that doesn’t exist in formal academic science literature.
Other Interests
While these three areas will be my primary focus, I am also interested in world politics, especially in the Middle East, in my home country (USA) and in Latin America. If I feel that I have something original to contribute on these topics, I will. I also am deeply interested in music, literature and art, so these areas will not totally escape my attention here. I’ll try not to be polemical about these issues as there is already too much hate and vituperation polluting the internet and social media.
I will continue to develop the structure of the blog, which is being written and structured in the Quarto markdown system via the new IDE called Positron (link to Positron IDE) and I will soon add a comments capability – as soon as I figure out how.
Any topics you would like me to address, please let me know. The blog has a number of links you can use to reach me.
Citation
@online{hunter2025,
author = {Hunter, James},
title = {First {Post} to the {New} {Blog}},
date = {2025-07-25},
url = {https://jameshunterbr.github.io/posts/25-07-24_first_post/},
langid = {en}
}