I have a background in clinical trials and observational studies, with a special interest in utilising health records and registry data for research. While clinical trials remain the gold standard for evidence, patient health records and health-insurance claims data can provide valuable insights into drug safety, advancing future therapies and ensuring existing therapies deliver optimal benefit to the patient. They may also help to make clinical trials more efficient, potentially reducing the number of patients needed for recruitment to, often costly, clinical trials.  

Since starting at UKM, I am investigating legal-age medicine as part of Prof André Karch’s team, and am seeking to set up vaccine projects to complement my existing interests in vaccines and using real-world data. I am Chief Investigator on the STOPFlu project: Statin Treatment OPtions during vaccination against inFluenza: an observational study of the interaction between statins and influenza vaccination. Current research suggests statins and the flu vaccine may health benefits beyond their intended purpose. This collaborative study with the UK universities of Plymouth and Exeter will look at the interaction between statins and the flu vaccine, and how the benefits from both therapies can be maximised. I am also working with on a novel, drug-repurposing study for treating Parkinson’s disease.  

I have research interests and been involved in projects involving (but not limited to): early-phase trial design; cluster phase III trial design; mixed-effects growth-curve modelling; quasi-experimental methods for causal inference from observational data; diagnostic studies.   I am supervising two PhD projects: one in compositional data analysis and one in Bayesian cluster-RCT designs.