Description:

Professor Stephen Senn, PhD, FRSE, CStat
Consultant Statistician
Edinburgh, UK

A key principle of the quality movement in manufacturing is that understanding variation is essential to improving quality. In particular treating noise as if it were a signal can harm quality rather than improving it.

Unfortunately, such confusion of noise with signal has accompanied the precision and personalised medicine movement over the last 25 years.

I shall argue that the necessary knowledge to do better is not lacking, it is just not applied. The population approach in pharmacometrics and the theory of components of variation in statistics provide important and useful insights. As befits my own interests and expertise I shall pay particular attention to the latter but also mention the former and conclude that a failure of scientific cooperation is harming progress.

Originally from Switzerland, Stephen Senn was head of the Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics at the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Luxembourg, 2011-2018, Professor of Statistics at the University of Glasgow, from 2003 to 2011, and Professor of Pharmaceutical and Health Statistics at University College London from 1995-2003. He has also worked in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, as a lecturer and senior lecture in Dundee and for the National Health Service in England. He is the author of the monographs Cross-over Trials in Clinical Research (1993, 2002), Statistical Issues in Drug Development (1997, 2007.2021), Dicing with Death (2003) and over 300 scientific publications. In 2001 Stephen Senn was the first recipient of the George C. Challis award for Biostatistics of the University of Florida, in 2008 he gave the Bradford Hill lecture of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and in 2009 was awarded the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society. In 2017 he gave the Fisher Memorial Lecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an honorary life member of Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI) and the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics. He is an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh. He retired in 2018 but is still researching and consulting in statistics.

Thursday, August 26, 2021
Seminar: 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. CDT
Q&A/Discussion: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. CDT