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Ian White, Professor of Statistical Methods for Medicine

Ian is a medical statistician with an interest in developing new methodology for design and analysis of clinical trials, meta-analysis and observational studies. He joined the Unit in 2017 after spending 16 years as a programme leader at the Medical Research Council's Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge.

Ian chairs the Unit’s Methodology theme, which comprises four programmes of trial-related research: Design, Conduct, Analysis and Meta-analysis. He leads the Design programme and co-leads the Analysis and Meta-analysis programmes.

Ian is particularly interested in methods for design of non-inferiority and other trials, including the non-inferiority frontier for non-inferiority trials with uncertain control event rate, the personalised randomised controlled trial (PRACTical) for settings without an accepted standard of care, and the combination of factorial and multi-arm multi-stage trials. Other interests in trials are in causal inference, for example to correct for departures from randomised treatment.

He has worked for many years in missing data, where he has contributed to the widespread use of multiple imputation and is now developing extensions for missing-not-at-random data. He is also particularly interested in meta-analysis and network meta-analysis, where he has developed methods for assessing and testing inconsistency. He co-wrote a tutorial on simulation studies.

Ian runs courses on many of these topics for the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and externally. He has also written a range of Stata software.


Selected publications

Heinze G, Boulesteix A, Kammer M, Morris TP, White IR. Phases of methodological research in biostatistics—Building the evidence base for new methods. Biometrical Journal Article number 2200222 03 Feb 2023 Publisher URL 

Turner RM, Clements MN, Quartagno M, Cornelius V, Cro S, Ford D, Tweed CD, Walker AS, White IR. Practical approaches to Bayesian sample size determination in non-inferiority trials with binary outcomes. Statistics in Medicine 20 Jan 2023 Publisher URL 

Clements MN, White IR, Copas AJ, Cornelius V, Cro S, Dunn DT, Quartagno M, Turner RM, Tweed CD, Walker AS. Improving Clinical Trial Interpretation with ACCEPT Analyses. NEJM Evidence 1(8) 01 Aug 2022

Pham TM, Tweed CD, Carpenter JR, Kahan BC, Nunn AJ, Crook AM, Esmail H, Goodall R, Phillips PP, White IR. Rethinking intercurrent events in defining estimands for tuberculosis trials. Clinical Trials 19 Jul 2022 Publisher URL 

White I, Choodari-Oskooei B, Sydes MR, Kahan B, Ford D. Combining factorial and multi-arm multi-stage platform designs to evaluate multiple interventions efficiently. Clinical Trials 17 May 2022 (Journal article)

Morris TP, Walker AS, Williamson EJ, White IR. Planning a method for covariate adjustment in individually randomised trials: a practical guide. Trials 23 Article number 328 18 Apr 2022 Publisher URL 

Salanti G, Nikolakopoulou A, Efthimiou O, Mavridis D, Egger M, White IR. Introducing the Treatment Hierarchy Question in Network Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Epidemiology 191(5):930-938 May 2022 Publisher URL 

Clark TP, Kahan BC, Phillips A, White I, Carpenter JR. Estimands: bringing clarity and focus to research questions in clinical trials. BMJ Open 12(1):7 pages Article number e052953 Jan 2022 Publisher URL 

Quartagno M, Morris TP, White IR. Why restricted mean survival time methods are especially useful for non-inferiority trials. Clinical Trials 3 pages Article number ARTN 174 23 Sep 2021 Publisher URL 

Walker A, White IR, Turner R, Yang HL, Wen YT, White N, Sharland M, Thwaites G. Personalised randomised controlled trial designs—a new paradigm to define optimal treatments for carbapenem-resistant infections. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 21 Apr 2021

 

Software

You can access the latest versions of his Stata software by typing (in Stata):

net from http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~rmjwiww/stata/





Research Interests

  • Trial design
  • Handling missing data
  • Statistical methods for meta-analysis and network meta-analysis
  • Causal inference in randomised trials
  • Simulation studies


Research Areas



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