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Caroline's vital statistics

Caroline Morgan, a second-year DPhil Statistics student in SMS, recently presented a paper at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Clinical Trials in Denver, Colorado. This society is an international body whose flagship journal is Controlled Clinical Trials.

Caroline was one of only three students chosen from over 30 applicants by the Student Scholarship Committee to receive full funding of up to $1,750 to attend the meeting, the other two students being from Brown University and the University of Michigan.

The annual competition requires the submission of a written paper based on the student's research and an oral presentation at the meeting. "I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from the experience, despite my nerves about giving the presentation," says Caroline.

Caroline's DPhil research - supervised by Dr Steve Coad - is concerned with the development and analysis of group sequential designs when response-adaptive treatment allocation is used. With these designs, data from a clinical trial are inspected after groups of patients' responses become available and the trial can be stopped early if there is convincing evidence in favour of one particular treatment.

Consequently, there is the potential for reducing the numbers of patients on inferior treatments, which can be further reduced through the use of an allocation scheme that assigns more patients to the treatment performing better thus far in the trial. Such designs present many interesting theoretical problems, such as how to carry out valid statistical inference upon termination of the trial.

Caroline completed her MMath degree in Mathematics and Statistics with a minor in European Studies at Sussex in 1999, having spent her year abroad at the Université de la Réunion.

 

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Friday 22 June 2001

 

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