People – «Reflective, researcher, randomizer»
Presenting the members of our steering committee: Prof. Steven Gilmour, Department of Mathematics, King’s College London, United Kingdom
1. Please describe yourself using 3 words that start with an R.
Reflective, Researcher, Randomizer
2. What motivated you to participate in the NRP 79 Steering Committee?
I am not an expert in 3Rs, but there are many aspects of it which my research in the statistical design and analysis of experiments is relevant to. I was delighted to be asked to join the Steering Committee for the opportunity to learn more and, hopefully, contribute something. Sample sizes clearly play an important part in 3Rs and I particularly like to encourage statistical thinking. For example, while we want to reduce animal numbers, we also need to question the worth of very small studies that will provide limited information. As a statistician, I feel my role is often to ask naïve, but difficult questions. I was also attracted by the very broad inter-disciplinarity of the programme.
3. How do you envision the future of the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement) principle in animal research, especially in light of your recent projects?
Others are much better placed to answer this than I am, but I can see some aspects related to statistics and data analysis. Researchers have access to much more data than in the past, both from their own studies and from available databases. Knowing what is available and how to access it can be a challenge. I hope that this can be addressed using methods developed in this programme among others. This also has implications for designing experiments, since some of the knowledge experimenters hope to gain might already be available. Having access to this could help researcher do smaller, or different, experiments.
Main fields of expertise:
- Statistical aspects of the design of experiments
- Response surface methodology
- Analysis of data from complex experiments
- Statistical assessment of AI algorithms