The Physiological Society - Online Symposium

Title:  Variability: How to Deal with It, Interpret It, and Learn from It

Date:  5 October - 6 October 2020 

Registration for this symposium is now open and will close at 23:59 on Tuesday 1 October. Registration will be free for the Physiological Society Members and £30 for non-Members.

Further details on the programme can be found here.

Organisers: Michael Tipton, University of Portsmouth, UK and Igor Mekjavic, InsitutJozef Stefan, Slovenia

Humans, other animals and engineering systems exhibit a wide range of individual responses to different stressors. Variability is ubiquitous, but we often choose to ignore it, hide it or delete it. Outliers are frequently removed from data sets and variability is hidden or ignored by use of summary statistics such as mean and mode.

The aim of this symposium is to consider when and how individual variability should be embraced as an important source of information. On the mornings of Monday 5 and Tuesday 6 October, physiologists, clinicians, statisticians and mathematicians will give examples of variability in data from a wide range of human, animal and engineering investigations. They will then provide recommendations regarding research design and analytical methods that allow researchers to better understand, interpret, and learn from the variation in their data.

In addition to this online symposium, the organisers plan to run an in-person workshop in September 2021 where attendees will have the opportunity to work through their data sets with expert statisticians. Further information about this will be provided soon.

This virtual event and the in-person workshop in 2021 are sponsored by the Energy Institute and have been organised in collaboration with the European Space Agency.