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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan

@lucystats.bsky.social
5.6K followers 177 following 326 posts

Biostatistician • Associate Prof @ Wake Forest University • former postdoc @ Hopkins Biostat • PhD @ Vandy Biostat • 🎙 Casual Inference • lucymcgowan.com

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Reposted by Lucy D’Agostino McGowan
Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Had so much fun chatting with @lucystats.bsky.social and @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social about gnarly real world data wrangling — from elections to EHRs and beyond! Show link below! Meanwhile, I’m live-posting of my latest civic data eng sidequests here bsky.app/profile/emil...
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🎙️ Today on Regression to the Mean Girls @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & I chat with the amazing @emilyriederer.bsky.social about a deep dive into election data! We chat data quality! Headless browser automation! Connections to EHR data! It’s great.
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Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 21/09/2026
Possibly the best gift I ever received (from @winstonchang.bsky.social)
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Also featuring tidy data brass knuckles…in case of emergency 🤣
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🎙️ Today on Regression to the Mean Girls @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & I chat with @hadley.nz about an over-engineered solution to purchase some beautiful art!
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Christine Zhang analyzed 415 episodes of Law & Order to answer the question: "How long does it actually take in Law & Order land for the criminal justice system to work, compared with how long it takes in reality?" @christinezhang.bsky.social regressiontothemeangirls.com/posts/03-law...
Analysis
Here’s a histogram showing the distribution of the time elapsed in each episode. The average Law & Order episode takes place over the course of about 68 days. How does that compare with reality?

Days elapsed over the course of a Law & Order episode
Based on an analysis of 415 episodes

[histogram diagram]
Average: 68 days

Real-life NYPD cases
take 800+ days to process

A timeline of cases in Law & Order
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Christine Zhang @christinezhang.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I had an amazing time talking w/ @lucystats.bsky.social @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social about my longrunning Law & Order obsession on Regression to the Mean Girls!! Check out my analysis of the Law & Order timeline ⚖️👩🏻‍⚖️ regressiontothemeangirls.com/posts/03-law... creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
creators.spotify.com
The Comfort of Competence and the Speed of Justice, According to Law & Order, with Christine Zhang by Regression to the Mean Girls
Christine Zhang (New York Times) joins ⁠⁠Sarah Lotspeich⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Lucy D'Agostino McGowan⁠⁠⁠ with a data-driven side quest into the TV show Law and Order. Check out the full analysis here: ⁠⁠regression...
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
🎙️ Today on Regression to the Mean Girls we interview @christinezhang.bsky.social (@nytimes.com ) who takes us down a delightful rabbit hole of Law & Order theories on the comfort of competence & speed of justice ⚖️ regressiontothemeangirls.com/posts/03-law... creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
creators.spotify.com
The Comfort of Competence and the Speed of Justice, According to Law & Order, with Christine Zhang by Regression to the Mean Girls
Christine Zhang (New York Times) joins ⁠⁠Sarah Lotspeich⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Lucy D'Agostino McGowan⁠⁠⁠ with a data-driven side quest into the TV show Law and Order. Check out the full analysis here: ⁠⁠regression...
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
On why I ♥️ Severance
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
🎙️ Regression to the Mean Girls Ep 2 is up! In which I share a deep dive on Severance data 😏 regressiontothemeangirls.com/posts/02-mys... open.spotify.com/episode/79hj...
open.spotify.com
The Work Is Mysterious and Important: Severance Data
Regression to the Mean Girls · Episode
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
🎙️ New Podcast! @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & I are launching Regression to the Mean Girls where we go way too deep into silly data side quests! In our first episode Sarah deep dives on time to first kiss in romance novels! open.spotify.com/episode/73wC... regressiontothemeangirls.com
open.spotify.com
Romance by the Numbers: First Sparks Across Tropes
Regression to the Mean Girls · Episode
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Thank you to everyone who came & for all the great discussion after! You can find: 🎞️ my slides here: www.lucymcgowan.com/talk/asa_joi... 📄 our article here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.07739
Lucy presenting a slide that says “My favorite things practical application and cute math”
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I wrote a bit on “doing your own research” to share with friends & family! Let me know what you think (and anything I should add!) theconversation.com/how-to-do-yo...
theconversation.com
How to do your own online health research like a scientist – a biostatistician’s step-by-step guide
Here’s how to sift through complicated studies without getting overwhelmed.
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The Cochrane Collaboration @cochrane.org · 05/08/2026
In a time of conflicting messages, how can you find reliable health evidence? The Conversation (@theconversation.com) has published some good tips on doing your own research on your health 👇️ theconversation.com/how-to-do-yo...
theconversation.com
How to do your own online health research like a scientist – a biostatistician’s step-by-step guide
Here’s how to sift through complicated studies without getting overwhelmed.
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Tom Langen @calocitta.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
A short, good common-sense guide to doing your own research about health topics.
theconversation.com
How to do your own online health research like a scientist – a biostatistician’s step-by-step guide
Here’s how to sift through complicated studies without getting overwhelmed.
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I’ll be talking about Symmetric Vaccine Efficacy (a collab with @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & Michael Hudgens) this morning! #JSM2026 📍 253 C ⏰ 9:50a 🎞️ docs.google.com/presentation...
docs.google.com
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Symmetric Vaccine Efficacy Lucy D’Agostino McGowan Department of Statistical Sciences Wake Forest University Interpretable Estimation and Inference for Vaccine Trials
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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
BREAKING The R Core Team just awarded the prestigious Rousseuw Prize in statistics, stats equivalent of Nobel Prize 🏆 🏆🏆🏆 #rstats A team effort over many years suitably recognized
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Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Come join me for a all new slidecrafting workshop! 2 hours of all new content, teaching you to go from zero to hero in quarto slides! It is free and open to anyone, very minimal quarto knowledge required, we are starting with the basics! pos.it/slide-wrkshp #quarto #slidecrafting
pos.it
Slidecrafting Workshop with Emil Hvitfeldt
This will be a 2-hour workshop (with a short break) led by Emil Hvitfeldt all about making great slides in Quarto! Wed, Aug 12, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
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Onyi Arah, MD, DSc, PhD @oacarah.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
The Honest Case for the #Humanities open.substack.com/pub/napinill...
open.substack.com
The Honest Case for the Humanities
Or: Why I’m Tired of My Colleagues Making Arguments That Only Work on Us
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Simon P. Couch @simonpcouch.com · 11/06/2026
Fable 5 is the new highest scorer on bluffbench! The eval measures models' ability to accurately describe plots that show counterintuitive patterns. Six months ago, the strongest models were still in the single digits. simonpcouch.github.io/bluffbench/
A horizontal bar chart comparing AI models' performance on the bluffbench eval. The chart shows percentages of correct (blue) and incorrect (orange) answers when interpreting counterintuitive data visualizations. The best score across all models is Fable 5 (Medium thinking), around 72%. The second best scores is Gemini 3.5 Flash (High thinking), around 60%. Without thinking enabled, most models cluster around 25%.
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
An intersection of two of my favorite things: improv+sci comm! @wakeforest.bsky.social just brought this group to train a bunch of us a few weeks ago, it was so fun!! www.wsj.com/lifestyle/sc...
wsj.com
Alan Alda’s Solution to Eroding Trust in Science: More Improv
The “M*A*S*H” star’s program to help researchers overcome their communication challenges now draws thousands. We sat in on a class.
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Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
If you ever wanted more out of `code-line-numbers` in your revealjs slides this new extension might be the one for you. I tried expanding the type of highlighting we could do on a line by line basis github.com/EmilHvitfeld... #quarto #slidecrafting
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
I need better branding for this but I am 100% on team “waste more time” because it’s not actually time wasted ♥️
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Amstat-American Statistical Association @amstatnews.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
This month we feature Staci Hepler, whose work spans teaching, research, and service—strengthening both the statistical community and the next generation of statisticians. Follow her journey from math tutor to statistics professor. magazine.amstat.org/blog/2026/05...
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
👀
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Frank Harrell @f2harrell.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
#Statistics thought of the day: Virtually all of single-event survival analysis (including Kaplan-Meier, Cox PH, AFT) is a special case of cumulative probability semiparametric ordinal regression models: hbiostat.org/rmsc/ordsurv #StatsSky
hbiostat.org
25  Ordinal Semiparametric Regression for Survival Analysis – Regression Modeling Strategies
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
We love our grads!! 👩‍🎓Congratulations! We can’t wait to hear about all of the exciting things you do next! #wfugrad @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social
Sarah hugging Grayson yay!!
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Trevor A. Branch @trevorabranch.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
I have LOVED getting to know so many brilliant folks at the Workshop on Applied Statistics in Agriculture & Natural Resources! Thank you so much for the invitation! My talk today was about the “causal gap” 🎞️ Slides here: www.lucymcgowan.com/talk/keynote...
The workshop attendees and me in a dress that matches my slides!
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Reposted by Lucy D’Agostino McGowan
Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...
There likely is nothing to be done at the moment to prepare for these possibilities (the only body of writing on the subject available in an emergency is science fiction), because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.

Maxwell W. Hunter, II
Member, Professional Staff
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Reposted by Lucy D’Agostino McGowan
Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
the only good thing* about having to use the delta method is getting to make @drob.bsky.social’s “(Taylor’s Version)” joke when writing it up *besides the fact that it “gets me” the “answer that I need”🙄
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Resurrecting my old remake of @rafalab.bsky.social & @wjakethompson.com's #rstats plot in honor of Star Wars Day livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2020-0...
livefreeordichotomize.com
May the Fourth Be With You (#rstats style) –
Rafael Irizarry made a fabulous TIE fighter plot in R, Jake Thompson recreated it using ggplot2 and gganimate, I added some stars.
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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Disclaimer: this is my first #quarto extension, I don't know what I'm doing That said, for who knows what reason I've always wanted a RevealJS feature where you can summon Wayne Knight to deliver his iconic "ah ah ah" line from Jurassic Park You're welcome (sound on) github.com/benharrap/ah...
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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 21/04/2026
Last week, I gave a keynote at appliedml.us/2026/ on machine learning and engineering. Like a lot of us, I've had questions and anxiety around software development today. The talk covers why good engineering is still important (and 🌷). vickiboykis.com/2026/04/20/b...
vickiboykis.com
Build yourself flowers
Living and working in a world of generated code.
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Please enjoy some of my finest work. In collaboration with my sister, Teesa D’Agositno, we bring you “I’m Just a Slope” a tribute to our love of statistics & The Lonely Island youtu.be/9EwUl6gyVGQ?...
youtu.be
Just a Slope
YouTube video by LucyStats
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rOpenSci @handle.invalid · 16/04/2026
✍️ [blog] Expanding the Editorial Team: Alec Robitaille and Lucy D''Agostino McGowan Join as Editors We're excited and grateful to welcome Alec and Lucy as new editors! Read more in the blog post: ropensci.org/blog/2026/04/16/editor… #RStats
ropensci.org
Expanding the Editorial Team: Alec Robitaille and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan Join as Editors
Introducing two new editors for rOpenSci statistical software peer review
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Davis Vaughan @davisvaughan.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
I had the pleasure of speaking to students at both Duke University and Wake Forest University about the existential crisis that many of them are feeling right now: In the age of AI, is my degree worthless? www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kTx...
youtube.com
Existential crisis! Is my degree worthless?
YouTube video by Davis Vaughan
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar @mattansb.msbstats.info · 05/04/2026
Interesting fact - while both calendars are drifting relative to the equinox, the Hebrew calendar's drift is much bigger (~1day/3000yrs vs ~1day/200yrs)! This means that Passover, typically before Easter, will eventually be typically after Easter (in about two thousand years...) Happy holidays! 🥚
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Waited to post this so no spoilies but goodness once again, 🐝 yesterday with Sherwin-Williams #6397 👀
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Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
👋 nerd friends, who had heard of hypochlorous acid? Apparently kills norovirus in one minute?? And safe on skin?? And I can make it in my kitchen with a bit of electrolysis?? 👀 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Hypochlorous Acid: A Review
The surgeon needs to have an inexpensive, available, nontoxic, and practical disinfectant that is effective in sanitizing against the COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) virus. The purpose of this article was to review the evidence for using ...
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Malcolm 朝精 Barrett @malcolmbarrett.malco.io · 26/11/2025
Eigenspace Jam
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
Saw Jen Tullock’s amazing show and was so enamored throughout that I snapped not a single photo, but got to chat after for a bit with the brilliant @hamburgerwaiter.bsky.social …we did discuss elevator pitches 👀😅
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
So proud of @ashleymullan.bsky.social -- featured on the cover of @significancemag.bsky.social! Check out her beautiful interrupted time series plot 😍
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
And for my next talk, “The Role of Congeniality in Multiple Imputation for Doubly Robust Causal Estimation” #IDWSDS2025 In which I insist imputation models MUST include: ✅outcome ✅exposure ✅all in PS model ✅all in outcome models *in the same functional form* 🎞️: www.lucymcgowan.com/talk/idwsds_...
lucymcgowan.com
The Role of Congeniality in Multiple Imputation for Doubly Robust Causal Estimation | Lucy D'Agostino McGowan
This talk provides clear and practical guidance on the specification of imputation models when multiple imputation is used in conjunction with doubly robust estimation methods for causal inference. Th...
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
I am SO enjoying celebrating International Day of Women in Statistics & Data Science by attending #IDWSDS2025 My first talk of the day: The Art of Data Refinement: Severance Analyses 🎞️ Slides: lucymcgowan.github.io/mdr-talk/ (All made in Quarto ♥️) Here is a sneak peak:
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
If you’re at the ISI conference, I’ll be here until Friday!
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Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Quick little update to quarto-revealjs-editable Now works with `::: editable` in addition to `::: {.editable}`. Not shown in gif. github.com/EmilHvitfeld... #quarto
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Not loving these MMRV headlines, they feel misleading! The vast majority of kids under 4 in this country get MMR and V separately when they’re ~1 and this is what will still happen. The combined MMRV is what is changing, but that was not commonly given to young children already
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Another delightful #positconf in the books! So lovely to see everyone 🌻 I miss it already! Especially excited about: 🤖 @minecr.bsky.social’s aifeedr 🌬️ Making my code pretty like @davisvaughan.bsky.social’s with air ✨ @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social’s editable quarto magic 📈 everything @kjhealy.co said
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