Biometrical/bioinformatical consulting service

Before applying for biometric consulting at IMB, we recommend that you carefully consider the following information:

1. Consulting Procedure

The first consulting session offers you a quick opportunity to present your problem(s). Usually, three IMB members will help you to identify the research aims and questions, and to discuss the conceptual biometrical issues. Moreover, it will be decided if further statistical expertise is required, and, if this is the case, who will be the responsible consultant for your statistical analysis. This first session usually takes place on Wednesday and lasts up to 30 minutes.

Please note: The consulting request should be submitted as early as possible, ideally in the planning stage of a project! It is strongly recommended that the PhD advisor attends the first consulting session together with the doctoral candidate. In the case of a short term consulting request (for example, in the case of publications or project proposals with deadline) we can't guarantee a prompt consultation due to the multiple responsibilities assigned to the IMB employees. Our staff is dedicated to optimally assisting you in your research activity, but we do not have enough personnel for fast consulting task force.

2.  Consulting Prerequisites

Our statistical consulting services are available for all members (students and employees) of Carl Gustav Carus School of Medicine (Faculty of Medicine and University Medical Center) at TU-Dresden. The IMB staff have prepared and put at your disposal the free online course ’Basic Principles of Biometry’. This course takes between two to five hours depending on your previous knowledge of statistics. It provides you with an understanding of basic statistical notions and concepts such as estimation and testing. We invite you to use this opportunity to get acquainted with or to refresh your statistical knowledge before the first consulting session.

3.  Consulting Process

The IMB biometric consulting covers various methodological aspects of experiment design, data collection, statistical analysis and result interpretation.  Both classical biometric and statistical questions, and applications of  bioinformatics methods (like the analysis of NGS data)  are in the focus of our advisory activity.

We offer consulting regarding the choice and the application of statistical software only to a limited extent. Active software support is available for the programming languages SPSS and R. For further assistance regarding statistical software, we urge you to use our teaching offers. Furthermore, students of the Faculty of Medicine can analyse your data independently in the PC-Pools, in House 105, Room 2.350.

There are three kinds of consulting services depending on the type and amount of the advisory activity:

a) Standard consulting
This procedure includes only a supporting component, meaning that the computational tasks are not performed by the IMB employees. The overall time commitment of the IMB employee will not exceed 10 hours. In special cases, the client will receive help during the computing process but will still assume full responsibility for realizing the statistical analysis.

b) Biometrical consulting for animal trial projects
This offer is confined to consulting support for your animal trial project, meaning that IMB members will play no active part in planning and computational parts of the project. The overall time commitment per case of the IMB member will not exceed 10 hours. In special cases, the client will receive help during the computing process but will still assume full responsibility for realizing the project. Hence, we do not guarantee the approval of the project by the Ethics Committee on Animal Experiments.

c) Consulting projects
Consulting is also possible for complex projects requiring more than 10 working hours and including an active statistical analysis and computational assignments for the IMB member. In this case, a consulting agreement stipulating the concrete services provided by the IMB and the financial compensation in return should be signed in advance. For information regarding prices, contract documents and contract negotiations, please contact our consulting service (email, Tel.: +49 (0)351 458-6062).

4.  Authorship and Contributorship of IMB Members

Any authorship or contributorship of an IMB member to a PhD thesis, publication or research project proposal (in the acknowledgement or as a co-author) should be explicitly agreed to and confirmed by our employee.

5.  Consulting Registration and Scheduling

You can apply for a first consulting session by filling out the registration form. Please follow the link. You will receive a confirmation email shortly.

Link to registration

If you are having trouble accessing the online registration, please contact: