Stephen Senn is an independent consultant statistician with over 40 years’ experience. Stephen began his career in the National Health Service in England and as a lecturer in Scotland before joining the Swiss pharmaceutical industry in 1987. Since then his interests have been in statistical methods applied to drug development. He has held professorial posts at University College London and The University of Glasgow and most recently was head of the Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics at the Luxembourg of Health.

Stephen’s main scientific interest has been in the design and analysis of clinical trials, but he has also researched in decision analysis, meta-analysis, ethics and statistical inference. Recently, through his collaboration in the IDeAl project, he has been involved in developing methods for studying treatments for rare diseases. He has also written extensively on the subject of personalized medicine and in particular how the scope for it, although important, may be narrower than many suppose.

Stephen is the author of more than 300 publications, including three monographs: Cross-over Trials in Clinical Research (Wiley, 1993, 2002), Statistical Issues in Drug Development (Wiley, 1997, 2007, 2021) and Dicing with Death (Cambridge, 2003, 2022).

Stephen blogs frequently on topics to do with statistical inference on Deborah Mayo’s Error Statistics Philosophy website and tweets regularly on statistical topics as @stephensenn.

Stephen is a PhD graduate in statistics from the University of Dundee. He is a recipient of the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society (2008), the George C Challis medal for Biostatistics of the University of Florida (2001) a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an honorary life member of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ISCB) and Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI). He is an honorary adjunct professor at the Medical University of Vienna and an honorary professor at the University of St Andrews and at The University of Sheffield.