About me
I am a Reader (equivalent to an Associate Professor outside the UK) at the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh.
My research primarily focuses on biostatistics, particularly on the statistical evaluation of biomarkers and diagnostic tests. I work in both Bayesian and frequentist (nonparametric) statistics, with a stronger preference for the former.
My time is approximately equally split between research, teaching, and administration — and I actually enjoy all three. My research may not — or rather, will not — change the world but I firmly believe that we can change lives through education that is free or, at the very least, accessible.
Research
My work centres on how well diagnostic tests and biomarkers distinguish between disease stages, and on how factors such as age and gender change that accuracy.
I pioneered the development of methods for inference about several summary measures of diagnostic accuracy — the partial area under the ROC curve, the Youden index and the covariate-adjusted ROC curve — that make no assumptions about the distribution of test outcomes in each population, or about how covariates relate to those outcomes. I was also the first to develop summary measures of diagnostic accuracy that account for a functional (curve-valued) covariate (Biostatistics, 2012).
Many of these methods are freely available in the R package ROCnReg. More details are on the Publications and Software pages.
