Ting Cai

I am a DPhil student in Primary Health Care under the supervision of Dr. James Sheppard, Prof. Richard Hobbs, and Dr. Sarah Lay-Flurrie. Within the department, I am attached to the group of Stratified TreAtments Research (STAR) and the group of Hypertension, while in collaboration with the Medical Statistics group and the CPRD research group.

My research interest involves evaluation of drug efficacy and safety through real-world observational study using electronic healthcare records (EHRs) and quantitative evidence synthesis of clinical trials data. Based on better understanding of the benefits and harms of pharmacotherapies in population, I am interested in developing clinical decision tools for targeting stratified treatments on the patients with appropriate trade-off, through construction of prediction models on individual outcome risks.

My DPhil project is to better understand the safety profiles of statins and refine the treatments for primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases, which is funded by the British Heart Foundation. This project includes systematic review of clinical trials, causal inference study using the CPRD databases, and predictive modelling of individual risks. This work will lead to the development of a new clinical decision support tool for both patients and doctors to use in shared decision making about whether to start or continue taking statin medications.

Prior to starting my DPhil study, I worked as a research assistant in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics in Peking University, following a 3-year research course for Master of Public Health there. My previous research work was basically within the fields of Pharmacoepidemiology, Pharmacovigilance, and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), and the research topics involved antidiabetics, antiepileptics, and vaccines.