A nice cup of coffee starts the day, then check the social media for the latest newsflashes and scan the newspaper for the background stories behind them. After feeding the cat and, in the dry season, watering the garden you drive to the office and join your colleagues for a new day of data crunching.
You plug in your laptop, check your agenda and see if new data has arrived during the night, knowing that clients and colleagues from overseas did their job when you were in dreamland. After reading the study protocols on the current data management tasks and discussing the specific NONMEM dataset needs with the project’s modeler you start programming the R code which will combine all necessary clinical data into an analysis-ready dataset.
Sooner than expected it’s time for lunch and an extra cup of coffee prevents an afternoon dip during the Quality Control task on a colleague’s report that you’ve scheduled after the break. Later that day you discuss the best noncompartmental analysis methods with some of your fellow workers and perform such an analysis on a Phase I study from a client. You save the resulting pharmacokinetic parameters in CDISC format for easy incorporation in the client’s clinical database and schedule the analysis for quality control by one of your colleagues. At the end of the working day you solve a data issue that an overseas modeler ran into and drive home in the knowledge that he or she can continue the modeling task while you recharge the battery for a new day of data crunching.