Open University Statistician Professor Paddy Farrington has been awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s Bradford Hill Medal for his contributions to the theory and practice of medical research.
The Society singled out his work in using statistical methods to estimate likely adverse reactions to vaccines and to detect infectious disease outbreaks.
Vaccines
He developed the self-controlled case-series method which has been used in many vaccine safety studies, including MMR vaccine and autism, and to investigate drug safety more generally.
Its key feature is that it uses data only on actual cases, which makes it easy to use and reliable. This work has been carried out in collaboration with OU colleagues Dr Heather Whitaker, Lecturer in Statistics; Dr Mounia Hocine (now Lecturer at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris); Dr Patrick Musonda (now Head of Analysis at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia); and Yonas Weldeselassie (currently studying for a PhD at the OU).
Infectious disease outbreaks
Paddy Farrington also developed the outbreak detection system currently in use at the Health Protection Agency, which has also been widely applied in other European countries.
Every week, this system scans all reports of infectious diseases identified by laboratories in England and Wales. A version of the algorithm (the mathematical procedure upon which the system is based) was run every day during the London Olympics. He is currently updating and improving the algorithm in collaboration with OU colleagues Dr Angela Noufaily and Dr Doyo Enki.
Paddy Farrington has also developed new models relating to the transmission of infectious diseases, in collaboration with OU colleagues Dr Mona Kanaan (now Lecturer at the University of York); and Dr Steffen Unkel (now Lecturer at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany).
The Bradford Hill medal was established in memory of Sir Austin Bradford Hill FRS, former president of the Royal Statistical Society. It is awarded every three years to a fellow of the Society for outstanding or influential contributions to the development, application or exposition of medical statistics.
It will be presented to Paddy Farrington at a ceremony during the Society’s annual conference in Newcastle on 3 September.
Image: Thinkstock