Interview participants also identified biostatistics core staff members as important to developing new TD collaborations at their centers. They described how biostatisticians had identified related themes or interests across projects they were involved in, that were run out of different departments, and had put PIs in contact. Biostatistics core members also played a unique leadership role in the TD integration of statistical methods. At one TREC I center, biostatistics core members conducted a series of projects in which they applied methods from one discipline to a data set generated in the context of another discipline. The results led to a novel and unexpected interpretation of the findings, with important implications. We felt as methodologists, we were a little less pigeonholed into one method versus another. And we thought that, as a group, we could push some of the transdisciplinary thinking, because we could come at it kind of in a more objective way, because, you know, it's numbers.
