Mahesh Parmar awarded Royal Statistical Society’s 2024 Bradford Hill Medal
08 May 2024
Mahesh (Max) Parmar, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology and Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, has been awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s Bradford Hill Medal for 2024.
The Bradford Hill Medal is awarded triennially to a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for their outstanding or influential contributions to the development, application, or exposition of medical statistics.
Max has been recognised for his innovative work on efficient designs for late-phase clinical trials. This includes fundamental statistical development, practical implementation of new designs, and evaluation.
On receiving this honour, Max said:
“I am honoured to receive the Bradford Hill Medal. In receiving this award I should like to thank the many hundreds of people I have worked with over the years to design and run these new and challenging trials including: clinicians, statisticians, trial managers, nurses, research administrators, and IT staff. Most of all I should like to thank the patients – those that I have worked with to design and run these trials and the many thousands that have volunteered and entered the trials. The progress we have made both scientifically and improving outcomes for many diseases would not have been possible without them.”
Max joined the MRC as a Statistician in 1987 and now serves as Director of both the MRC CTU at UCL and the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology. In 2019, he was awarded an OBE in Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday Honours.
Throughout his career, Max has collaborated with clinicians to design, conduct and analyse a wide range of high-quality clinical trials, with an initial focus on cancer trials. Many of these have had a direct impact on clinical practice through influencing treatment guidelines worldwide.
As the originator of the multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) platform trial design, Max has also pioneered new methodological advances which transformed the way clinical trials are run, improving the speed and efficiency of trials globally.
Max led the STAMPEDE platform trial in advanced prostate cancer, whose MAMS platform design has delivered practice-defining results multiple times since it began almost 20 years ago. MAMS designs are now widely used across the world in a range of disease areas, including COVID-19, TB and multiple sclerosis.
The Royal Statistical Society will award their 2024 medals in Brighton on Wednesday 4 September during the Society’s Annual Conference.
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