Biostatistics Unit

Director: Prof Carl Lombard
E-mail: carl.lombard@mrc.ac.za

The Medical Research Council (MRC) is one of South Africa's largest public organisations dedicated to advancing knowledge in all areas of public health. It consists of a large number of separate units and centres located across South Africa, each with its own research focus area.

The Biostatistics Unit (BU) is a multi-centre facility in the MRC for biostatistical expertise in evaluating public health strategies, developing statistical methods and interpreting biomedical studies. Although the BU was established in 2000 this unit is a continuation of the initial Institute of Biostatistics founded in 1974 in the MRC. Our current role is to provide statistical, methodological and data support to medical and health researchers working within the MRC network, both nationally and internationally.

The Biostatistics Unit has three regional offices, situated in Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban, each with a complement of senior and junior statistical staff and data encoders.

Our aims
The aims of the BU are to enhance biostatistical research and to foster collaborations among researchers, clinicians and biostatisticians within the broad MRC network by providing the following collaborative services:

• The biostatisticians provide input into the design of protocols, questionnaires or aspects of data capture design, statistical analyses, statistical reporting and statistical review of reports and manuscripts.
• Appropriate power calculations for estimating sample size that balance clinical and biological limitations, cost and resource limitations while maintaining statistical power and efficiency.
• Methodological developments by the BU are used to enhance the inference of collaborative projects, work that frequently forms the basis for post-graduate studies and first-authored publications.
• Data capture into various databases forms an integral part of the BU's support and helps to ensure the highest level of data quality. We have flexible data transfer software that can link databases to multiple statistical packages (and vice versa).
• The staff are also involved in capacity development through the teaching of short courses at various universities and technikons across South Africa.

Our areas of expertise and interest
The Biostatistics Unit's research and support is closely aligned with the priorities in the research agenda of the MRC, and therefore statistical inference in Public Health and Clinical Research form the basis of its work.

Specific areas of expertise and interest include:

• Survey sampling and analysis
• Mixed effects models for categorical data
• Survival analysis with multiple and recurrent events
• The design and analysis of individual and cluster randomised controlled trials.
• Statistics in genetics
• Health performance statistics,
• Spatial statistics,
• Bayesian statistics

The BU staff have strong training in methodology as well as experience in applications and collaborations, which allows us to do own research and also provide expertise to the medical community.