Development and validation of new flexible statistical methods for etiological and prognostic studies

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My research programme will continue focusing on the development and validation of new statistical methods for the analysis of health data. In particular, with my trainees and collaborators, we will aim at elaborating new methods that will be able to account for the complexity of the processes leading to the occurrence of various diseases or affecting disease progression. Specialized methods will also be developed to allow a more efficient detection of potential adverse effects of medications. This issue is of increasing societal importance as it has been recently dramatically illustrated by highly publicized withdrawals of very popular pain relief drugs that were found to double the risks of heart attacks and deaths due to heart disease. Detection of such adverse effects and accurate assessment of their impact are challenging because dose, patterns and duration of drug use vary across subjects and over time. Moreover, it is unclear whether and what delay may exist between drug use and its negative effects. However, recent accelerated progress in both computational resources and statistical theory will allow us to develop flexible methods that avoid restrictive assumptions and reflect the complexity of the processes underlying and affecting human health.