News

Last week was a big one for the ViCBiostat team who presented at both the Australian Trials Methodology Conference 2023 and the Australasian Epidemiological Association (AEA) Scientific Meeting 2023.

Kicking off on Monday, twelve of the team attended the AusTriM pre-conference workshop on Platform trials and master protocols, delivered by Thomas Jaki and James Wason. 

On Tuesday the AusTriM conference commenced in Melbourne (and online) with Rory Wolfe, Katherine Lee and (Conference Committee Chair) Rhys Bowden opening the proceedings. The Monash SPHPM-based "cluster cluster" presented in the cluster randomised trials stream, with Rhys Bowden, Jessica Kasza, Kelsey Grantham and Ehsan Rezaei giving an overview of their recent work in the space. Over in the concurrent applied innovation stream, Julie Simpson presented on an evaluation of a pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model for in Phase 2 studies of new antimalarial drugs.

Wednesday was a busy day with day 2 of the AusTriM conference featuring presentations from Liz Ryan, Julie Marsh and Robert Maher in the Bayesian trial design session, as well as Sabine Braat and Anurika De Silva in the innovative analysis session. Meanwhile, over at the AEA pre-conference day, the causal team (Margarita Moreno-Betancur, John Carlin, Ghazaleh Dashti, Marnie Downes, Daisy Shepherd, Rushani Wijesuriya and Tong Chen) were presenting a one-day workshop on “Causal analysis methods: beyond standard regression”. The course generated lots of interest, with 64 participants!

On Thursday, an innovative early-career researcher session organised by Ghazaleh Dashti and others opened the way to important discussions on causal thinking and methods, led in large part by Margarita Moreno-Betancur as one of the discussants. Over in the infection and injury session, Julie Simpson took to the stage again to present an IPD meta-analysis on the efficacy, safety and tolerability of primaquine in paediatric patients.

In total, six of our postdocs and students presented their latest research in contributed sessions at AEA over Thursday and Friday, on topics ranging from causal machine learning to multiple bias analysis and practical aspects of G-computation. Well done to Rushani Wijesuriya, Daisy Shepherd, Jiaxin Zhang, Susie Ellul, Tong Chen and Lachlan Cribb.

Pictured (L-R): Tong Chen, Jiaxin Zhang, Ghazaleh Dashti, Margarita Moreno-Betancur, Rushani Wijesuriya, Marnie Downes, Daisy Shepherd.