Professor Adrian Barnett

Adrian Barnett is a statistician with a degree in statistics and PhD in mathematics. He currently works at the Queensland University of Technology and is the President of the Statistical Society of Australia. He has over 20 years’ experience in analysing health and medical data and has worked on many large data sets including worldwide data on deaths during winter and national data on hospital infections. His research interests are in epidemiology, health services and research funding.

Evidence-based research in health and medicine is a fantastic way to improve and save lives. Adrian has seen many researchers spend their lives collecting data and thinking about big problems, only to have much of this effort wasted due to poor statistical analysis. He believes we could dramatically improve the value of evidence and help society by making some relatively small changes to how we conduct research. His main goal is to improve the way we fund, run and reward health and medical research. He aims to promote the use of thoughtful statistics, instead of mechanistic approaches.