Abstract
Biostatistics is foundational to public health research and Canada has a history of high impact contributions both in seminal methodological advances and in the rigorous application of methods for the design or analysis of public health studies. In this article, we provide a brief and personal review of selected contributions from Canadian biostatisticians to fields such as survival and life history analysis, sampling, clinical trial methodology, environmental risk assessment, infectious disease epidemiology, and early work on prediction. We also provide a brief look forward at the upcoming needs and future directions of biostatistical research.
Résumé
La biostatistique est fondamentale pour la recherche en santé publique et le Canada a un historique de contributions à fort impact, tant dans les avancées méthodologiques majeures que dans l’application rigoureuse de méthodes pour la conception ou l’analyse d’études de santé publique. Dans cet article, nous présentons un examen bref et personnel des contributions des biostatisticiens canadiens dans des domaines tels que l’analyse de la survie et de l’histoire de vie, l’échantillonnage, la méthodologie des essais cliniques, le risque environnemental, l’épidémiologie des maladies infectieuses et les premiers travaux sur la prédiction et la classification. Nous fournissons également un bref aperçu des besoins à venir et des orientations futures de la recherche biostatistique.
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Acknowledgements
RJC is University Professor and Faculty of Mathematics Research Chair at the University of Waterloo. EEMM is a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Methods for Precision Medicine and holds a chercheur de mérite career award from Fonds de recherche du Québec, Santé.
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RJC and EEMM jointly drafted the text of the commentary and participated in the revision of the work. The commentary is based on plenary talks given by each author at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB); the presentations on which the commentary is based were each the sole work of the individual authors.
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Cook, R.J., Moodie, E.E.M. A retrospective and prospective study of biostatistics in Canada. Can J Public Health (2024). https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-024-00866-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-024-00866-w