"A M.S. in statistics. Sadly, the non-Bayesian kind for the most part"
I'd hardly be ashamed of having a 'non-Bayesian' statistics degree. Bayes is referenced a lot in LW, and for good reason but Bayes theorem is not all that difficult to understand particularly for someone with your education. The most useful skill a knowledge of statistics can give you, arguably, is being able to objectively analyse and comprehend extremely large amounts of data.
Have you looked into the possibility of acquiring a research partner? It may be a more effective use of your time to predominantly take care of the statistical analysis and the biological experimentation while your partner (endowed with skills you don't have time to learn yourself) can present fresh ideas for new research. This method would be prone to less bias and if it's a race against time, you may not have enough to acquire an entirely new skill set.
Bayes is referenced a lot in LW, and for good reason but Bayes theorem is not all that difficult to understand particularly for someone with your education.
The point isn't understanding Bayes theorem. The point is methods that use Bayes theorem. My own statistics prof said that a lot of medical people don't use Bayes because it usually leads to more complicated math.
The most useful skill a knowledge of statistics can give you, arguably, is being able to objectively analyse and comprehend extremely large amounts of data.
That's not the skill that's...
Imagine you had the following at your disposal:
Imagine that your goal were to slow or prevent biological aging...
Thanks for your input.
Update
I thank everyone for their input and apologize for how long it has taken me to post an update.
I met with Aubrey de Grey and he recommended using the anonymized patient data to look for novel uses for already-prescribed drugs. He also suggested I do a comparison of existing longitudinal studies (e.g. Framingham) and the equivalent data elements from our data warehouse. I asked him that if he runs into any researchers with promising theories or methods but for a massive human dataset to test them on, to send them my way.
My original question was a bit to broad in retrospect: I should have focused more on how to best leverage the capabilities my project already has in place rather than a more general "what should I do with myself" kind of appeal. On the other hand, at the time I might have been less confident about the project's success than I am now. Though the conversation immediately went off into prospective experiments rather than analyzing existing data, there were some great ideas there that may yet become practical to implement.
At any rate, a lot of this has been overcome by events. In the last six months I realized that before we even get to the bifurcation point between longevity and other research areas, there are a crapload of technical, logistical, and organizational problems to solve. I no longer have any doubt that these real problems are worth solving, my team is well positioned to solve many of them, and the solutions will significantly accelerate research in many areas including longevity. We have institutional support, we have a credible revenue stream, and no shortage of promising directions to pursue. The limiting factor now is people-hours. So, we are recruiting.
Thanks again to everyone for their feedback.