Introducing our two new biostatisticians

In their roles, Rushani Wijesuriya and Adrian Laughlin, will provide statistical support and advice to the department’s high-quality primary care and health services research programs. These include the research projects currently being undertaken within department's research groups, such as, Cancer in Primary Care; Children and Young People’s health; Integrated Mental Health, Data Driven Quality Improvement; Sexual Abuse and Family Violence: SAFE; and Diabetes and Cardio-Metabolic Conditions.

Rushani recently completed her Biostatistics PhD thesis (currently under examination) at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD research focused on developing and evaluating statistical methods for handling missing data in complex epidemiological studies with multiple levels of clustering. Rushani will be providing statistical support to a range of projects across the department. Initially she will assist with the analysis of a large cross-sectional survey of 14,880 University students and protocol development of a cluster randomised trial, both related to improving young people’s health outcomes.

Adrian has a background in Psychology and is currently undertaking his Master of Biostatistics at the University of Melbourne. He gained experience working with large health-related datasets and knowledge of topics including injury prevention, mental health nursing and human-machine interaction. Adrian will be providing data management, planning and statistical analysis support to several projects but is initially focusing on working with the Future Health Today team as their trial gets underway this month.