About the Authors

Monika M. Wahi, MPH, CPH, is a well-published data scientist with more than

20 years of experience, and president of the public health informatics and educa-

tion firm DethWench Professional Services (DPS) (www.dethwench.com). She is

the author of Mastering SAS Programming for Data Warehousing and has coauthored

over 35 peer-reviewed scientific articles. After obtaining her master of public

health degree in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota School of Public

Health, she has served many roles at the intersection of study design, biostatis-

tics, informatics, and research in the public and private sectors, including at

Hennepin County Department of Corrections in Minneapolis, the Byrd

Alzheimer’s Institute in Tampa, and the U.S.  Army. After founding DPS, she

worked as an adjunct lecturer at Laboure College in the Boston area for several

years, teaching about the U.S. healthcare system and biostatistics in their bachelor

of nursing program. At DPS, she helps organizations upgrade their analytics

pipelines to take advantage of new research approaches, including open source.

She also coaches professionals moving into data science from healthcare and

other fields on research methods, applied statistics, data governance, informatics,

and management.

John C. Pezzullo, PhD, spent more than half a century working in the physical,

biological, and social sciences. For more than 25 years, he led a dual life at Rhode

Island Hospital as an information technology programmer/analyst (and later

director) while also providing statistical and other technical support to biological

and clinical researchers at the hospital. He then joined the faculty at Georgetown

University as informatics director of the National Institute of Child Health and

Human Development’s Perinatology Research Branch. He created the StatPages

website (https://statpages.info), which provides online statistical calculating

capability and other statistics-related resources.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my favorite “dummy,” my dear old dad, Bhupinder Nath

“Ben” Wahi. He is actually a calculus whiz. He used to point to the For Dummies

books when we’d see them at the bookstore and say, “Am I a dummy?” Of course,

I won’t answer that! — Monika