Doug Altman

Doug Altman
Born 12 July 1948
Residence United Kingdom
Nationality British
Fields Statistician
Institutions Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Cancer Research UK, University of Oxford
Alma mater University of Bath
Known for Medical statistics
Notable awards Royal Statistical Society's Bradford Hill Medal[1] (1997)

Professor Douglas G. Altman FMedSci (born 1948) is a British statistician. He is the Founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group.

His varied research interests include the use and abuse of statistics in medical research, studies of prognosis, regression modelling, estimation methods, systematic reviews and meta-analysis, randomised trials, reporting guidelines and studies of medical measurement.

Early professional years

Doug Altman graduated in statistics from the University of Bath. His first job was in the Department of Community Medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School. He then spent 11 years working for the Medical Research Council's Clinical Research Centre where he worked almost entirely as a statistical consultant in a wide variety of medical areas.

Current professional activities

In 1988 Doug Altman became head of the newly formed Medical Statistics Laboratory (now Medical Statistics Group) at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), and in 1995 also became founding director of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (CSM) in Oxford. In 1998 he was made Professor of Statistics in Medicine by the University of Oxford.

He is the statistical advisor to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), where he is a member of the editorial "hanging committee". He is a co-convenor of the statistical Methods Group of the Cochrane Collaboration.

He is an active member of the CONSORT Group since 1999, a group dedicated to offering a standardised way for researchers to report trials. The intent is to make the experimental process more clear, flawed or not, so that users of the data can more appropriately evaluate its validity for their purposes.

Doug Altman is also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and editor in chief of Trials.

He is also one of the original authors of the IDEAL framework for improving surgical research.[2]

Notable achievements

Select bibliography

Books authored

Books edited

Peer-reviewed articles

List of the over 396 articles by Doug Altman available through PubMed.

References

  1. "Bradford Hill Medal". Royal Statistical Society. Retrieved 3 January 2010. Established in memory of Sir Austin Bradford Hill FRS
  2. McCulloch P, Altman DG et al. "No surgical innovation without evaluation: the IDEAL recommendations." Lancet. 2009 Sep 26;374(9695):1105-12. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61116-8.

External links