Person Overview

Vern Farewell is completing 16 years as a Programme Leader, having also had a period of being acting Director during 2011. Prior to moving to BSU in 2001, Vern held professorial positions at the University of Washington, the University of Waterloo and University College London. He has published widely in the statistical and medical literature and is co-author of the five editions of the book "Using and Understanding Medical Statistics". From 2007 to 2013, he was an Editor of "Statistics in Medicine".

BSU Research Overview

The data needed to answer the most pressing medical questions often have sufficient complexity that its collection and analysis requires very careful application of available statistical methods or the development of new or modified methods. For this reason, we aim to be synergistically active in both applied medical research and statistical methodological research. A particular methodological emphasis is on the analysis of data collected longitudinally to address multiple questions related to the course of particular diseases. Particular aspects of this work are the development of analysis methods that account for the correlation of observation from a single subject over time, often through random effects models, and the use of multi-state structures to appropriately model change in disease over time. Our applied collaborative medical research includes long-standing collaborations in studies of rheumatic diseases, particularly psoriatic arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, but also covers a spectrum of other diseases.