Shaun Hiu

I joined the Primary Care Clinical Trials Unit as a Medical Statistician in November 2024. I am currently involved in the design of a platform trial called the Early Psychosis Multi-arm, Multi-stage Platform Trial (PUMA), which seeks to evaluate multiple potential treatments for people with early psychosis.

Prior to my time at the PC-CTU, I studied Psychology for my Bachelor’s and Master’s and spent some time doing research in areas of ageing such as dementia and workplace ageism during this period. I then joined the Biostatistics Research Group at Newcastle University in 2019. I worked as a trial statistician spanning areas such as head and neck cancer, childhood obesity, frailty, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, and paediatric nephrology. I also worked on large observational datasets such as the UK Primary Biliary Cholangitis (UK-PBC) cohort, UK Biobank, and the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD). During my time at Newcastle, I was fortunate to secure an NIHR pre-doctoral fellowship award to gain hands-on experience applying methods and concepts in causal inference towards clinical trials and the emulation of clinical trials with large observational datasets. I am studying part-time for an MS in Statistics with Medical Applications.

My research interests include the application of causal inference methods (such as inverse probability weighting and g-computation) to clinical trials and observational data, Bayesian statistics and inference, and recently trials that use Master Protocols. I am currently collaborating with investigators on the AI-MULTIPLY consortium to plan and design emulations of clinical trials surrounding polypharmacy and multiple long-term conditions using UK primary care data.