Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Statistical Leadership, and Methodological Research

Richard Cook
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
University of Waterloo

Innovations in biostatistics are most relevant and impactful when motivated by important problems in health and bioscience. Such problems are most effectively identified through genuine and deep engagement in strong interdisciplinary research teams. The important role of new and long-standing collaborations in stimulating lines of statistical research is highlighted through discussion of several vignettes involving collaborations in smoking prevention studies, palliative trials in metastatic cancer, and studies of chronic disease processes based on clinical registries of patients with autoimmune diseases. The foundational role of statistical thinking is emphasized, including understanding how individuals are selected, how observations are made, and how representative samples are over time. Such fundamental questions have relevance in any setting, but are worthy of renewed attention in a time when high volume administrative data are increasingly drawn upon for insights into disease processes and “real world evidence” of intervention effects.

Biography
Richard Cook is University Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and Faculty of Mathematics Research Chair with a cross-appointment in the School of Public Health at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests include the analysis of life history data, the design and analysis of clinical and epidemiological studies, and statistical methods for the analysis of incomplete data. 

He has published extensively in these areas and written two books with Jerald Lawless (The Statistical Analysis of Recurrent Events, Springer, 2007; Multistate Models for the Analysis of Life History Data, Taylor and Francis, 2018). He designed served as Director or co-Director for three major graduate training programs in biostatistics including the  

GlaxoSmithKline-UW Pharmaceutical Statistics Graduate Program, the Methodology Team of the CANNeCTIN grant for cardiovascular  clinical trials, and the Biostatistics Training Initiative funded by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Richard is deeply engaged in collaborative health research with other scientists working in transfusion medicine, immunology, and cancer, and consults widely with industry and government organizations.

In 2008 he was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association, in 2018 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada, and in 2021 he was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.