Leon Di Stefano

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I am an applied statistician and Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Prof. Katherine Lee in the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia. (This is a personal website.)

Research Interests

I work on the design and analysis of adaptive platform trials—clinical trials that investigate multiple interventions for a given disease or condition, with interventions entering or leaving the study as evidence accrues about which ones work best. I am helping to design a platform trial in pediatric sepsis.

More broadly I want to help biomedical scientists generate clear, comprehensible, and decision-relevant evidence from their experiments. I am interested in both clinical trials and laboratory experiments, and in all stages of the process: from planning and design, through modelling and data analysis, to communicating and interpreting results.

Background

I completed my PhD in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, advised by Dr. Kasper Hansen and Prof. Elizabeth Stuart. There were two projects in my dissertation:

During my doctoral studies I was also part of efforts to pool data from clinical trials of drugs repurposed to treat COVID-19.

Before this I worked in the laboratory of Dr. Tony Papenfuss (primarily in cancer genomics), and completed undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of Melbourne.

Other Interests

Functional programming (including reproducible research using Nix and related technologies), philosophy and theology, classic Hollywood movies, fonts and lettering, spending time with my family.