Strategic Statistical Consultant

Venita grew up in rural Oregon, amidst turkey farms and corn fields.  Her love of nature began early, watching the deer run through the back pasture. Her exposure to the health care field also began early, after her father suffered a work-related accident that left him paraplegic.  While advances in health care gave him a lifespan decades beyond the original expectations, it also gave her a firsthand experience with the gaps in medical knowledge and the impact that developing fields of health care could have on a family’s day-to-day life.

While her original plans when attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks were to focus on wildlife biology, an engaging teacher introduced her to the field of statistics, and her path was set.  She loved exploring Alaska.  Her career in health care started there, where she worked at a long-term care facility for several years.

Venita moved to North Carolina in 2001 to pursue her Master of Statistics at NCSU, and began doing statistical consulting while still a student.  She first began to combine her interest in health care with her love of statistics when she began working at Duke Clinical Research Institute, when she finished her Master’s in 2003.  She enjoyed working on a number of projects including oncology, depression, and irritable bowel syndrome.  Venita also began working on her doctoral dissertation, which incorporated health care costs of patients with pneumonia in the Duke Medical System.

Venita began working more directly on clinical trials in 2006, when she joined INC Research (now Syneos).  She served as the lead statistician on a variety of trials, as well as coordinating the ISS/ISE for INC’s first successful NDA submission.  She also expanded her SAS programming skills, and began volunteering with the Southeast SAS Users Group (SESUG) conference.  She left INC in 2010 to be able to focus on her statistical consulting business and wrap up her Ph.D.  She enjoyed the variety of projects, clients, and therapeutic indications.

After working with several of the Facet team for mutual clients, Venita was thrilled to join the Facet team at the beginning of 2024.  She’s happy they thought she was fun to work with! Venita loves consulting, thinks simulations are vastly under-utilized when determining sample size calculations and believes SAPs should be very explicitly written. When she’s not playing with data, she loves to spend time in nature.  She’s an active scout leader, and enjoys backpacking and kayaking especially; but any time she can spend outdoors, she’s happy.