Ian Hambleton

I am a biostatistician with a first degree in Mathematics, a Masters in Medical Statistics and a Doctorate in Statistical Epidemiology. I have worked as a statistician for 25 years in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, variously for the UK Medical Research Council, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and The University of the West Indies (UWI). I have expertise in a wide range of research study designs, and have a long history of leading project data handling and analytics, including the management of solutions for robust and secure online data collection. I have published over 150 peer-reviewed articles on a broad range of chronic and infectious diseases. Working with academia, I have secured over 14 million US dollars of funding for health-related research. With colleagues at the University of the West Indies and elsewhere, I am currently organizing analyses for the Barbados National Registry for chronic non-communicable diseases, for ‘The Health of the Nation’ - a national survey to assess Barbadian health, and for ECHORN – the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network. I have been a principal investigator on a recently completed NIH award to better understand health inequalities in the Caribbean, and have continued to investigate Caribbean health inequalities using a wide range of publically available datasets. Recently funded projects include an evaluation of the Barbados tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, the use of virtual environments for testing the utility of different policies for reducing the regional diabetes burden, and the development of methods for assessing the health impacts of community food production initiatives – a response to the problem of food security in small island developing nations. I have a commitment to open-access data, and am developing an infrastructure for collecting and sharing research data across the UWI community. I continue my long-standing involvement with haemoglobinopathy research, working with groups around the world on sickle cell disease severity. I am a statistical editor for the Cystic Fibrosis and Genetic Disorders group of the Cochrane Collaboration - an international not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving healthcare decision-making globally. I work with the International Diabetes Federation – developing methodology for reporting global and regional diabetes prevalence, with the Pan-American Health Organization – developing guidelines for analysing mortality in the presence of small numbers, and am a statistical consultant for UNICEF – the United National Children’s Fund.