When Murray Clayton reads news stories about College research or browses through the CALS Quarterly, he often has a unique perspective on the science being covered: for many of the stories reported, he and his colleagues played a critical role in sorting out the t-tests, X-bars and Z scores that transform raw data into meaningful interpretation.

“We’ve worked with those people!” is a common refrain, says Clayton. A statistician by training, he chairs the plant pathology department and helps oversee the College’s statistical consulting facility (which supports researchers in CALS as well as the departments of zoology and botany). Although he has no formal background in biology, he came to the department in 1984 as part of a long-standing practice to place statisticians where they can do applied work.

As Clayton knows very well, the College houses a broad array of research, from the basic life sciences to applied work in agriculture, food science and natural resources. In fact, Thomson Scientific recently ranked the UW-Madison as the top high-impact university for agricultural science as measured by paper citations. And from the complexities of protein structure to the distribution of wolves in northern Wisconsin, statistical analysis is essential to all types of research.

That’s where Clayton and the consulting facility come in. Housed in the basement of the Animal Sciences building with the CALS Computer Lab, it serves as a resource to undergraduate, graduate, staff and faculty researchers. And with five faculty members, two graduate students and four academic staff members–including one recently hired to manage daily operation and help reduce waiting time–the group is ready to tackle whatever questions come their way.

“We work on every aspect of a problem,” says Clayton. “From experimental design and grant writing to data collection, analysis and interpretation. We provide a lot of creative input to the researchers we work with. Very rarely do they come to us with textbook problems, so we often have to invent entirely new strategies and tools to help them.”

It’s this collaborative approach that Clayton says is one of the strengths of the facility–the consultants serve as a “neutral party” to help investigators take a step back from their work and look at problems in a new way.

“You can only accumulate so many advanced degrees. The people we work with are experts in their disciplines, but statistics is an ”exploding science” that changes with computing technology. We can do things today that were completely impossible ten or fifteen years ago, and who knows what’s on the horizon five years from now. That’s the nature of interdisciplinary research: people of different backgrounds can produce something none of them could do alone.”

One of the best parts of his job, says Clayton, is the fact that he never knows who will walk in the door next. He has consulted on projects that use milk yields as indicators of overall herd health, examine the effects of fungal prevalence on potato early dying disease, and study how shoreline disturbance changes fish distribution in lakes–and he says that even though as a boy growing up in Ontario he never would have imagined the path his career would take, he wouldn’t change it for anything.

“I have the chance to learn from people who are leaders in their field–and I can have some input of my own. I get to teach some statistics, and at the same time make a difference in another field of science. And I can watch a project go from tearing-your-hair-out to publication in a peer-reviewed journal to a popular-press article.”

Clayton’s faculty colleagues associated with the consulting facility include Erik Nordheim, forest ecology and management; Brian Yandell, horticulture; Jun Zhu, soil science; and Bret Larget, botany. All five have joint appointments in the statistics department. Academic staffers Tom Tabone, Peter Crump and James Stephenson provide user assistance and manage the computer facility, while Nicholas Keuler was recently hired as an additional consultant to help reduce the wait for the facility. Ting-li Lin and Jungwon Mun are graduate student assistants.

Researchers who wish to contact the statistical consulting facility can find more information as well as an online sign-up form at https://webhosting.cals.wisc.edu/calslab/stat.html