Matthew completed his PhD in statistics in 2019 at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Dr. Ayesha Ali and Dr. Gerarda Darlington. He was awarded the 2020 Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for his research on leveraging the graphical structure among predictors to improve outcome prediction. He has been working (on and off) in the health product industry at Quantics Biostatistics since 2015. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick from 2020-2022 before resuming a full time role at Quantics in 2023.

Speaker Information:

Speaker: Matthew Stephenson

Affiliation: Principal Statistician, Quantics Biostatistics 

Talk Title: Statistics: the key to efficiency in health product development

Abstract: Statisticians play a critical role in the development of health products.  The role of a statistician begins early in the planning phase of a clinical trial, continues through the development and execution of the statistical analyses and extends post marketing.  In this talk I will discuss the role a statistician plays in the health product sector drawing on my experiences working in the industry. I will make use of the pubic ally available COVID vaccine trial protocols as a working example to demonstrate how statistical techniques can be used to increase the speed with which a product is brought to market without compromising the integrity of the trial. If time permits, I will also briefly discuss the methodology used to ensure consistent batch quality in commercial production.