Recent activities

Medical section

Dr Anna Heath is a biostatistician at SickKids Hospital in Toronto within the Child Health Evaluative Sciences (CHES) program, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and an honorary research fellow at University College London in the Department of Statistical Science. We spoke with Anna about the application of health economic ideas to the conception, design and analysis of clinical trials, and in particular the concept of the Value of Information whereby we can quantify the economic value of obtaining information through research.

Statistical Developments in the Calculation of Value of Information

Martin Bland, Emeritus Professor of Health Statistics from the University of York, shares stories from his statistical journey and friendship with the celebrated medical statistician Doug Altman, who sadly passed away in 2018. Doug Altman is considered by many to have contributed more than any other statistician to improving the evidence for clinical practice. A world-leading expert on health research methodology and reporting, Doug was director for the Centre for Statistics in Medicine and professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, posts he held for more than 20 years: https://www.statslife.org.uk/news/3817-douglas-altman-1948-2018

Martin Bland

Professor Deborah Ashby gave her RSS President's Address on 25th June 2019 in London. We caught up with Deborah to talk about her statistical background, her career in medical statistics and why growing capacity to use data for society is a particular passion of hers.

Professor Deborah Ashby - RSS President's Address

Mags Wiley speaks to Colin Gillespie from Newcastle University about his modelling of sheep flocking.

A Bayesian Analysis Of Animal Movement Data

Mags Wiley speaks to Rachel Hogg about the work she does as a statistician at NHS Blood and Transplant, as part of the team looking into the reasons why mortality rates for patients on the lung transplant list are so high and how better patient care can be delivered.

An Analysis Of Patient Outcomes From Listing For A Lung Transplant

Jen Rogers interviews Amy-Jayne McKnight to discuss the challenges associated with genomic data. We consider how data is captured, processed, and then analysed and AJ outlines the challenges presented by sources of variability.

Analytical Challenges Of Harmonising Diverse Datasets

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), talks to Darren Dahly (University College Cork) and Maarten van Smeden (Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum) about Twitter and the role the social media platform can play in supporting and developing a statistical career – from finding research collaborators to critiquing papers and everything in between.

Tweet All About It! The Rise Of #Stats Twitter

Brian Tarran, editor of Significance (www.significancemagazine.com), interviews John MacInnes (http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/sociology/macinnes_john), chair of the Royal Statistical Society Professional Affairs Committee and professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. They discuss the changing forms that statistics is taking in the era of data abundance and the ethical challenges this gives rise to.

The Future Of Statistics And Statistics Education

Professor Christl Donnelly, of Oxford University and Imperial College London, gave the 29th Bradford Hill Memorial Lecture on 30th June 2020 in London. We caught up with Christl to talk about her vast practical experience of applying methods in the context of infectious diseases, including SARS, MERS, Ebola and Covid-19. We discussed the real-time analysis of infectious diseases and some of the questions related to this we might ask. For instance, how many cases are there, who's getting sick and how fast is the epidemic growing? Christl explained how statistics, epidemiology and modelling can help to address these questions.

Real-time epidemiology, statistics and modelling with Professor Christl Donnelly

Dr Maria Van Kerkhove is an epidemiologist at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and technical lead for the Covid-19 pandemic. We spoke with Maria about how the WHO is able to best use vast amounts of data and research findings to inform guidance and some of the challenges and opportunities for the future.

Use of data and research at the World Health Organisation with Dr Maria Van Kerkhove

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is one of the world's most distinguished and renowned statistical societies.  It is a learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics, data and evidence for the public good.

It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London and became the Royal Statistical Society by Royal Charter in 1887.  Today the Society has more than 10,000 members around the world, of whom many are professionally qualified as Chartered Statistician.  The RSS is active in a wide range of areas both directly and indirectly relevant to the study and application of statistics.