Statistical Consulting
Overview
We are a group of graduate students and faculty in the Department of Statistics who assist graduate students, post-docs, faculty, and staff with statistical analysis for ISU-related research projects. To learn more about our services, see our services and consulting process. Curious about who we are? Meet the people behind Statistical Consulting on our team page.
Consultation Services
Services We Offer
- Aid in articulating scientific questions that can be addressed with your data.
- Provide guidance on experimental and study design including power analysis and sample size calculations.
- Advise on data management and formatting. We can provide guidance on what your dataset should look like and can suggest resources for cleaning your data.
- Suggest appropriate exploratory data analysis from calculating summary statistics to data visualization.
- Recommend statistical methods and models, including model form, selection, and assessment.
- Edit code to analyze data in R, SAS, Python, and JMP. We also offer support in SPSS and Stata.
- Interpret analysis output and address scientific questions.
We Do Not
- Help with statistics homework or class projects. This service is for research projects.
- Teach basic statistical methods or coding. We expect you have taken STAT 5101: Statistical Methods for Data Analysis.
- Provide services on short deadlines. Depending on the complexity of the problem and our current workload, a few weeks may be required.
- Clean messy data. The ISU Library Research Data Services provides resources and workshops.
- Provide significant intellectual contribution(s) without appropriate recognition. We aim to give advice, provide sample code, and suggest resources so our clients fully understand the recommended analysis. If you would prefer that we conduct the entire analysis or write manuscript language, further discussion is needed.
Data Privacy and IRB Compliance
We can work with de-identified human subjects' data, including datasets requiring IRB approval, provided individual identities cannot be linked and you have IRB approval to share the data with us. For proprietary data, please anonymize site names or other identifiers before sharing.
Request a Consultant
Fill out the consultant request form. You will be contacted within 2 business days. Due to Winter Break, responses will be limited from December 20 through January 4. Normal operations will resume on January 5.
Researchers in Business and VetMed have dedicated consultants. Please contact Anthony directly for Business at pnakk@iastate.edu and Yangyifan ylu1@iastate.edu for VetMed.
Before submitting a consultant request, please review our services and consulting process.
In order to fill out the form, your computer must be either on the ISU campus network or connected via VPN.
Upcoming Events & Workshops
- Statistical Consulting will be offering drop-in hours from during Grad Mixer Wednesdays next semester (Spring 2026). This will be from 10:00 am – 12:00 pm in Student Innovation Center 4237 on January 28; Feb 4, 11, 18, and 25; March 4, 11, and 25; and April 1, 15, 22, and 29 (dates subject to change).
- The workshop "R You Ready? An Introduction to R for Beginners" will be held by the University Library on February19th, 2026 from 1:00 - 3:00 pm.