Biostatistics University of Otago, Christchurch

J Elisabeth WellsNovember 2012

Canterbury Statistics Day

Our biostatistics activity is primarily research rather than teaching, although advice and guidance provided to research students is both. As yet there are no specific statistics papers, just a very small amount of such teaching within the undergraduate medical courses or post-graduate research methods papers.

There are consulting biostatisticians, research biostatisticians, and Philip Schluter, who is now the Professor of Public Health but by training and prior employment has been a biostatistician. His interests are in Pacific health, longitudinal studies, epidemiology, biostatistical methodologies.

Consulting biostatisticians

The consultants try to cope with the wide variety of studies that are brought to them. Their particular interests and strengths are listed below:Chris Frampton: consultant in Medicine and Psychological Medicine. Interests include the modelling and prediction of long-term outcome data, and developing structural equation models for defining personality constructs.John Pearson: general consultant. Interests in microarrays, genetics, bioinformatics, statistical computing and survey methods.Elisabeth Wells: general consultant. Interests in psychiatric epidemiology and survey methods.Jonathan Williman: general consultant. Interests in clinical trials and infectious disease epidemiology

Research StatisticiansPatrick Graham (Public Health and General Practice): Interests in Bayesian methods, causal inference, population health, confidentiality and institutional performance.John Horwood (Christchurch Health and Development Study): Interests in psychosocial development in adolescence and young adulthood including cannabis use and consequences, life course trajectories in antisocial behaviours and consequences of early onset psychiatric disorder.Jim Young (Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Public Health and General Practice): Interests in methods and problems arising from longitudinal studies of HIV patients. Collaborative work continues with Magnus McGee on papers arising from the New Zealand Mental Health Survey. Interests in programming, data handling, and analysis.