Doug Altman graduated in statistics in 1970. After 6 years in epidemiological research at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School he spent 11 years working for the MRC in a wide variety of clinical areas. He has been Director of the Medical Statistics Group of Cancer Research UK (previously ICRF) since 1988 and founded the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford in 1995. Doug is author of Practical Statistics for Medical Research (1991) and co-editor of Statistics With Confidence (1989 and 2000) and Systematic Reviews in Health Care (1995 and 2001). He is statistical advisor to the Cochrane Collaboration and the BMJ and is one of the executive members of the CONSORT Group. His interests include the use and abuse of statistics in medical research, studies of prognosis, regression modelling, randomised trials, meta-analysis, and studies of medical measurement.
Martin Bland joined the University of York as Professor of Health Statistics in 2003. Before this he spent 27 years at St. George's Hospital Medical School, University of London, following posts at St. Thomas's Hospital Medical School and in industry with ICI. He has a BSc in Mathematics, an MSc in Statistics, and a PhD in Epidemiology. He is the author of An Introduction to Medical Statistics, now in its third edition, and, with Janet Peacock, Statistical Questions in Evidence-based Medicine, both Oxford University Press. He is co-author of more than 160 refereed journal articles reporting public health and clinical research and on research methods, and, with Prof. Doug Altman, edits and writes the Statistics Notes series in the British Medical Journal. His personal research interests are in the design and analysis of studies of clinical measurement and of cluster randomised clinical trials.
Marion Campbell is Professor of Health Services Research and Deputy Director of the Health Services Research Unit in the University of Aberdeen. An experienced medical statistician and trialist, Marion currently directs a programme of research evaluating health care interventions. The programme is primarily focussed on the evaluation of non-drug technologies, such as surgical interventions. Marion's primary research interests are in the methodology of evaluative research, especially the design, conduct and analysis of individual and cluster randomised trials. She has served as member and Chair of a number of data monitoring committees (DMCs) and was a member of the DAMOCLES (Data Monitoring: Lessons, Ethics, Statistics) group, which recently reviewed best practice for DMCs.
Paul Glasziou PhD, FRACGP is the Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford and a part-time general practitioner. He has worked for many years in developing evidence-based practice including teaching evidence-based practice to medical and postgraduate students, running regular workshops for other health care workers, editing the BMJ's Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine and chairing the Cochrane Collaboration's Methods group on Applicability & Recommendations. He has published over 100 scientific papers and four books: "Decision Making in Health Care: Integrating Evidence and Values", "Systematic Reviews in Health Care", "Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice & Teach EBM" and the Evidence-Based Medicine Workbook.
Fiona Godlee is a medical editor, writer, and publisher. She qualified as a doctor in 1985, trained as a general physician in Cambridge and London, and is a member of the Royal College of Physicians. She joined the BMJ as an assistant editor in 1990. In 1994 she spent a year at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow, evaluating efforts to bridge the gap between medical research and practice. On returning to the UK, she led the development of a new product, Clinical Evidence, which is now provided worldwide to over a million clinicians in 9 languages. In 2000 she moved to Current Science Group to establish the open access online publisher BioMed Central. In 2003 she returned to the BMJ Publishing Group to head up its new Knowledge division. In March 2005 she became editor of the BMJ. She has served as President of the World Association of Medical Editors, and chairs the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Peter Gøtzsche MD, DrMedSci, is Director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, chief physician at Rigshospitalet, and lecturer in theory of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. He first graduated as a biologist and worked for some years in the pharmaceutical industry. Subsequently he graduated as a physician and became a specialist in internal medicine. He defended his thesis "Bias in double blind trials"¿ in 1990. Together with professor Henrik R. Wulff, who wrote the book originally in 1973, he is author of "Rational diagnosis and treatment: evidence-based clinical decision-making"¿ which over the years has also appeared in Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Swedish.
Julian Higgins is a Senior Investigator Scientist at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, and Senior Epidemiologist at the Public Health Genetics Unit in Cambridge. His principal research interests are in systematic reviews, meta-analysis and evidence synthesis with applications to clinical trials and human genome epidemiology, with particular interests in dealing with bias and variability across studies, sequential methods, missing data and Bayesian methods. He contributes to The Cochrane Collaboration as Co-Editor of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions and Co-Convenor of the Statistical Methods Group among other roles. Julian is also a contributor to the Human Genome Epidemiology Network (HuGENet) as a member of its Executive Committee.
David Schriger MD, MPH is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Methodology/Statistical Editor for Annals of Emergency Medicine. Research interests include the veracity of medical literature and the use of graphs in the medical literature. He spent the 2003-4 academic year as a visiting fellow at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine and had a wonderful time.
