Fred Shirley’s physics master’s project this year is quite stats-centric, involving enormous data sets that have to be analyzed in ridiculously small amounts of time in order to winnow out uninteresting data and focus scarce resources on potentially interesting data. (at the CERN LHC)

The conceptual work requires deep understanding of data and statistical analysis, but the implementation requires very strong programming skills. In Fred’s case, a two-person team has ended up being very helpful, with each person more suited to one of those skill sets than the other.