Clincial Trials

I pursue research into the design and analysis of clinical trials. I have worked on sequential methods, which are used to monitor trials and make decisions on when to stop a study. My book with Professor Bruce Turnbull, "Group Sequential Methods with Applications to Clinical Trials", is a standard text on this topic, widely used by practising statisticians. More recently, I have worked on adaptive clinical trial designs which allow a broader range of interim decision making, such as treatment selection or re-defining the target population, during the course of a trial. This research is informed by experience of clinical trial analysis at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, consultancy with medical research institutes and pharmaceutical companies, and participation in clinical trial data monitoring committees. I am a member of the DIRECT consortium (funded by the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative) and the MASTERMIND project (funded by the MRC and ABPI), which are exploring personalised treatment strategies for patients with type 2 diabetes.

Image Analysis and MCMC

I also have interests in the statistical image analysis, spatial statistics and the computational methods used to fit complex models to large data sets. Here, the application areas range from medical and biological data to remote sensing and modelling the atmosphere. With motivation from these applications, I have worked on aspects of Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation, including perfect sampling, mode jumping and methods for sampling distributions which are almost confined to a subspace of the parameter space.