At the end of June, SAS launched a new credential: the SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS 9. This was the culmination of months of work by lots of people.  In our press release, we identified that we worked with "a broad cross-section of practitioners and hiring managers from academic research organizations, contract research organizations and pharmaceutical companies, as well as industry consultants and SAS Press authors."  We'd like to acknowledge that team and thank them publicly for their efforts.

Our project began with some internal conversations here at SAS with some of our Life Science experts, each of whom spent considerable parts of their careers developing, testing and executing SAS programs to support clinical trials. This included Ben Bocchicchio, Nancy Cole, David Handelsman, Angela Lightfoot, and Janet Stuelpner. These early discussions shaped the outline of the certification and helped to confirm the skills we had seen in the job descriptions for clinical trials programmers.

Then we expanded our team outside the boundaries of SAS Institute. This group identified the specific critical skills that should be tested, wrote the exam questions, and completed an intensive week-long technical review of the beta exam. This team was comprised of:

• Wendy Baker – Manager, Statistical Programming, Quintiles
• Matt Becker – Senior Director of Statistical Programming at PharmaNet and PharmaSUG Executive Committee member and PharmaSUG 2000/2006 chair.
• Diane Bundas – Principal Statistical Programmer, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc.
• Warren Carin – Manager Programming at GlaxoSmithKline
• Neil Howard – Director of Biostatistical Programming at Amgen and SUGI 20 chair
• Carol Matthews – Project Director, Clinical Programming at United Biosource Corporation and Co-author of Validating Clinical Trials Data Reporting with SAS
• Ralf Minkenberg – Senior Statistical Programmer at Boehringer Ingelheim
• Greg Nelson – President and CEO of ThotWave Technologies
• Jack Shostak – Associate Director, Statistics at Duke Clinical Research Institute and author of SAS Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Janet Stuelpner – Solutions Architect at SAS

We here at SAS Certification appreciate this team's dedication and hard work on this project. They put in a lot of hours above and beyond their normal day-job responsibilities. Thanks! We couldn't have done it without you.