Dr Patty Chondros, University of Melbourne

Biostatistician in Primary Care

Patty Chondros is the lead biostatistician at the General Practice and Primary Health Care Academic Centre, The University of Melbourne. She has worked at the Academic Centre for over 10 years and in this role she has gained a strong understanding of primary care research and has developed expertise in the design, conduct and analysis of randomised controlled trials and longitudinal studies in the primary care setting.

Patty has extensive experience in the management and analysis of large datasets with complex data structures through her work on a large vaccine clinical trial with over 800 babies and the diamond longitudinal study of 789 general practice patients with depressive symptoms to be followed up for 10 years. She has led the statistical analysis on eight randomised controlled trials in primary care including advice regarding sample size, randomisation, analyses and reporting.

She has over 40 publications in national and international refereed journals, including high ranking journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, Circulation and the Lancet.

In her role as the biostatistician in primary care, she also provides supervision and mentorship to primary care researchers and research higher degree students in research design and quantitative methods.

Patty was awarded her PhD in 2012. Her doctoral research led to the development of a set of practical recommendations to assist researchers and applied statisticians in deciding when to use the matched-pair design in cluster randomised trials in primary care and how to best analyse data from matched-pair studies.