I provide tailored statistical consultancy on best practices for study design, as well as the subsequent analyses, inference interpretation and publications. My fields of expertise range from clinical trials to epidemiological and biological studies; areas in which I provide statistical advice to a number of faculty members at St George's, University of London and St George's Hospital. Part of my responsibilities and contributions consist of providing regular guidance to clinical trainees and researchers, through the statistical design and data needed to answer the questions which build their fellowship applications.
Whilst providing direct dissertation supervision to final year BSc, MSc and MRes students interested in learning data analyses processes, my support often extends to my colleagues' students in terms of statistical plans and analyses.
I can be contacted by email for statistical advice - preferably at the very incipient stage of a new project. Please feel free to read my consultancy questions (Word) to help prepare you for our first meeting, including points of discussion and items for consideration.
ORCID
I joined St George’s in June 2013 as tenure track after holding research positions in biostatistics with Imperial College London and University College London. I hold a PhD in Pure Mathematics and an MSc in Medical Statistics (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).
My research interests and experiences span a variety of observational, epidemiological and clinical data of different complexities, including those featuring spatio-temporal components or hierarchical structure. The latter may arise from patients’ longitudinal observations, individuals within a spatial, administrative or household unit, multiple hospital episodes or clustered survey design. I have extensive experience in using a variety of statistical packages including Stata, OpenBUGS, R, SPSS, SAS as well as programming in C/C++.
My previous work involved developing computationally intensive methodologies for statistical inference in both Bayesian and classical frequentist context.
I also hold an honorary faculty position with Universidad Internacional del Ecuador, Quito (https://www.uide.edu.ec/) where I teach short postgraduate classes and tutorials in statistical epidemiology as well as participating in developing statistical strategies for future cooperative international projects.
I have been invited and accepted to be a member of the Statistical Board for the Journal of Critical Care https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-critical-care/editorial-board.
An important component of my past and current research is my work on deriving infectious diseases prevalence from serological data, particularly for infections which result in life-long immunity. Using dengue and chikungunya serological assays collected in a province in Ecuador during recent outbreaks in South America, I have recently developed a method addressing infectious diseases prevalence inference for two simultaneous infections which share similar clinical manifestations and modes of transmission.
I lead all the statistical aspects as co-investigator of a Latin America asthma grant (led by Phil Cooper) from design and sample size calculations to planning the analyses. The resulting data would provide an excellent opportunity to formalize a statistical framework for methodologies which address recurrent events in a variety of respiratory conditions.
I am the statistical lead and co-investigator for a trial funded by AstraZeneca held in patients with heart failure conducted by a team of clinicians and scientists at St George's University and Hospital Trust (principal investigator - Dr Debasish Banerjee).
Together with a couple of colleagues from the II&I and NHS Trust, I also investigate the extent to which epidemiological data alone can provide evidence for associations between the length of antimicrobial therapy and emerging resistance to aminoglycosides in neonates based on the last 12 years of routinely hospital collected data.
Furthermore, I am involved in a series of cardio-vascular projects where I conduct detailed analyses aiming at understanding the burden of various post-mortem diagnoses and other characteristics related to Sudden Death populations - both general and that of professional athletes.
Successful grants include:
- Adoption of Lung Protective ventilation in patients undergoing emergency laparotomy (ALPINE).
Funder: NIAA-AAGBI (National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia)
- Reducing Acquisition of CMV through antenatal Education: A feasibility study to assess an educational intervention to prevent cytomegalovirus infection in pregnancy (RACE FIT). Funder: NIHR with Dr Chrissie Jones and Prof Paul Heath)
- Novel Methods for Risk Assessment of Patients with Brugada Syndrome: The London and Belfast Brugada Collaboration (LBBC) (Funder: British Heart Foundation grant with Elijah Behr)
- Asthma attacks in Latin America - 2 million grant with (led by Phil Cooper) and International consortium which include experts from Ecuador and Brazil and UK. Funder: NIHR
- LiFT - Lokelma for maximisation of RAAS inhibition in CKD patients with Heart Failure; a randomized double blind placebo controlled Trial - 295,000£ Funder: AstraZeneca. The funder bears no responsibilities in conducting, implementing and disseminating the results of the trial which is held at St George's (Clinical lead and expertise - Prof Debasish Banerjee).
- NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Inequalities (~7 million) - international cooperation between UK-Brazil-Ecuador (Lead applicant Prof Alastair Leyland-MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit and Prof Phil Cooper co-lead at St. George's University of London)
- Statistical lead for Prevention of Admissions for CKD Patients (60k). Funder: South West London Integrated Care system. (Clinical lead and expertise - Prof Debasish Banerjee)
Main cooperators on various projects include:
St George’s University
Professor Phil Cooper
Professor Elijah Behr
Professor Sanjay Sharma
Professor Paul Jones
Professor Paul Heath
Dr Tim Planche
St George’s NHS Hospital Trust
Dr Justin Richards
Dr Debasish Banerjee
Dr Ken Earle
Dr Anthony Pereira
Dr Meriel McEntagart
UK
Professor Max Bachmann
Internationally
Dr Natalia Cristina Romero Sandoval
Dr Alejandro Rodriguez
Dr Evelyn Calderones
Dr Diana Garcia
Dr Victor Seco Hidalgo
Dr Belinda Grey
I deliver a range of lectures in statistics applied to epidemiology and clinical data and lead a planned postgraduate module in Population Health Data Research - part of MSc Translational Medicine programme. Topics include:
Undergraduate lectures include
- Learning from the data in biomedical research
- Basic statistics with R (elementary tests and regression techniques for various types of outcomes)
- Exploratory data techniques (principal component analysis, cluster analysis)
Postgraduate topics (past and current) include
- Longitudinal data analyses
- Basic concepts in artificial intelligence - supervised and unsupervised data learning
- Bayesian statistical analyses using OpenBUGS, R and Stata.