Course Director: Faculty
This Statistical Programming II course focuses on practical programming skills using SAS, a leading commercial data analysis software package, including SQL programming within SAS. Through lectures, demonstrations, hands-on laboratories, assignments and applied real-world projects, students will learn how to manage, analyze and report healthcare-related data. The course emphasizes programming logic, reproducible data management, accurate statistical analysis, clear documentation, and professional reporting skills relevant to careers in biostatistics, data science, clinical research, health analytics and beyond.
Specifically, students will learn Base SAS syntax and the DATA step and PROC steps, and SQL programming; import data from multiple sources; create, recode, subset, sort, reshape, transpose, and combine datasets; and work with variable attributes, formats, informats, functions, arrays, and iterative processing. These skills enable students to perform tasks such as data cleaning, error diagnosis, descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, graphics, and report generation. Students will also be introduced to advanced SAS techniques, including macro programming and SQL, as well as the generation of tables, listings, and figures (TLF) for clinical reporting and an overview of CDISC data standards (SDTM and ADaM). Students will also have opportunities to explore SAS programming in an AI-enabled environment. Differences in syntax among SAS, SQL and other common languages, such as R, will be compared and explained.
Upon completing this course, students will be prepared to pursue the SAS Base Programming certification exam(s) to become SAS Certified Associate/Specialist and build a foundation for advanced SAS Professional certification.