Good Science is hard to find. In fact, it’s hard to define, but the amount of money spent on a study or the impact factor of the journal where there the results were published probably wouldn’t be your first choice as criteria.
There will always be a place for quality research, conducted slowly, thoughtfully and rigorously, driven primarily by a desire to improve the lives of others rather than one’s own. I’m trying to do Good Science by working in small, inter-disciplinary teams who share a mutual interest in understanding the work of everyone in the team, rather than large, multidisciplinary teams where the exchange of expert knowledge is much more difficult. Put another way, I'd rather be a bad bass player in The Beatles than the best bugler in the Back of Beyond Brass Band. This is work with my colleagues in the school of Public Health at the University of Adelaide, and the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. I am also involved in developing and using statistical methods for the assessment of research integrity, data fabrication, academic misconduct and old-fashioned scientific fraud. This is work with colleagues in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, a similar environment to the King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women and Infants in Perth where I worked for five years after completing a PhD at Telethon Kids Institute and working at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, also in Perth.
A brief biography: I’m Lyle C. Gurrin BSc(Hons) PhD AStat FRSS, a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Melbourne. I have worked in health and medical research for 25 years and have run my own epidemiological studies looking why some people with a genetic or immunological predisposition to disease never experience symptoms, such as HFE-associated hereditary haemochromatosis (iron overload) and childhood food allergy. I teach several subjects in the Master of Biostatistics both on campus at UniMelb and online through the Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia. With “ViCBiostat” in Melbourne and “BetterStart” in Adelaide I develop methods for causal inference and apply these to record-linked data, evaluating interventions that aim to address the negative health effects of early childhood adversity. More recently I have been working on using observational data to emulate the results of randomized controlled trials and extend existing risk prediction models to improve the health system’s response to child maltreatment in Australia.
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FEATURED Journal article
Childhood predictors of lung function trajectories and future COPD risk: a prospective cohort study from the first to the sixth decade of life
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Credentials
Positions
Professor
Melbourne School Of Population And Global Health
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Western Australia
Bachelor of Science (Honours)
The University of Western Australia