Dr Richard Emsley

Role

Richard is a Lecturer in Biostatistics in the Centre for Biostatistics.  He currently holds an MRC Early Career Centenary Award and previously held an MRC Career Development Award in Biostatistics.  He is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Biostatistics at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Memberships of Committees and Professional Bodies

Society Memberships

Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society

Member of the International Biometric Society (IBS)

Member of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics

Member of the Society for Clinical Trials

Committee Memberships

Chairman, Royal Statistical Society Manchester Local Group (2009 - present)

Member, Royal Statistical Society Medical Section Committee (2013 - present)

IBS representative on the Steering Committee  for the International Year of Statistics 2013 (2011 - present)

Member, International Programme Committee for International Biometric Conference 2014 (2011 - present)

Other Group Memberships and Roles

Chair, Steering Group for UK Causal Inference Meeting (UK-CIM) (2012 - present)

Secretary of the Mental Health Research Network Methodology Research Group (2006 - present)

British and Irish Region correspondent for Biometric Bulletin (2010 - present)

Member of the British and Irish Region IBS Committee (2009 - 2012)

Inaugural member of the RSS Young Statisticians' Forum (2005 - 2007)

Associate Faculty member, Faculty 1000 (2009 - present)

Research

Richard's research involves the development of statistical methods for causal inference with applications to efficacy and mechanisms evaluation, including trials of complex interventions in mental health.  He has developed methods and associated Stata software for causal mediation analysis, and for estimating causal effects in longitudinal studies with intermediate variables. 

His other research interests include the application of causal inference methods in pharmacoepidemiology and routinely collected datasets (eHealth), and trial designs and associated analysis methods in stratified medicine.

A lay profile about this work is available on the MRC website.

Further details can be found in the following MRC Methodology Grant project pages:

• Estimating causal effects of complex interventions in longitudinal studies with intermediate variables
• Design and methods of explanatory (causal) analysis for randomised trials of complex interventions in mental health
• Designs and analysis for the evaluation and validation of social and psychological markers in randomised trials of complex interventions in mental health

Richard's doctoral research implemented the use of double robust estimators of marginal structural models to assess for non-adherence in randomised trials.  In joint work with Mark Lunt, they have developed a Stata command (dr) which carries out the double robust procedure and can be downloaded from the following website.

He is the initiator and member of the steering group for the UK Causal Inference Meeting (UK-CIM), secretary of the Mental Health Research Network Methodology Research Group, and a member of the Psychosis Research Partnership project, funded by The Wellcome Trust and led from the Institute of Psychiatry.

Richard currently supervisors three PhD students, and welcomes interest from potential PhD students interested in these research areas.

Methodological Knowledge

Design and analysis of randomised trials, with particular application to complex interventions in mental health research.

Statistical methodology for causal inference.

Latent variable modelling including mixture models.

Teaching

Richard teaches on the Fundamentals of Epidemiology and Biostatistics modules of the Masters in Public Health course.  He also contributes to the teaching of fourth-year undergraduate medical students. He has also previously lectured and been module leader on the SPSS module on the Research Methods Programme in the School of Dentistry.

Biography

Richard graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester with a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics with Statistics in June 2003.  He was awarded an MRC Studentship to study for a PhD in the Biostatistics Group under the supervision of Professor Graham Dunn and Professor Andrew Pickles. The PhD entitled "Statistical Models of Selection and Causation" was completed in 2007.

He joined the staff of the Biostatistics Group and from October 2006 to September 2009 he worked as a Research Associate on an MRC Methodology Grant investigating the design and methods of analysis of trials of complex interventions in mental health. 

In October 2009, Richard was appointed as a Research Fellow after being awarded a 3 year MRC Career Development Award in Biostatistics to continue aspects of this research.  As part of this Award, he spent four months in 2011 as a visiting researcher at the Program on Causal Inference in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health.  He was awarded an MRC Early Career Centenary Award to extend this Fellowship until April 2013.

In October 2012, Richard became a Lecturer in Biostatistics in the new Centre for Biostatistics.  He is also Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Biostatistics at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Qualifications

BSc (2003) Mathematics with Statistics, Victoria University of Manchester

PhD (2007) Medical Statistics, The University of Manchester

GradStat (2008)

Collaborators and affiliated staff

Local Collaborators:

Professor Graham Dunn - Professor of Biomedical Statistics

Professor Chris Roberts - Professor of Biostatistics

Dr Mark Lunt - Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics, ARUK Epidemiology Unit

Professor Christine Barrowclough - Professor of Clinical Psychology

Professor Linda Davies - Professor of Health Economics

Professor Jonathan Green - Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Professor Alison Wearden - Professor of Health Psychology

External Collaborators:

Professor Andrew Pickles - Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London

Dr Ian White - MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge

Professor Frank Windmeijer - University of Bristol

Professor Philippa Garety - Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London

Professor Jonathan Sterne - University of Bristol

Professor Garrett Fitzmaurice - Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University

Professor Tyler VanderWeele - Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University

Dr Patrick McElduff - Univeristy of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

PhD Students:

Philip Foden (2011 - )

Emily Eisner (2011 - )

Lesley-Anne Carter (2012 - )

Selected publications

View all publications

Selected research projects

View all research projects