Following a national search, the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) named new leadership for its Data Science and Biostatistics team. Chris Lindsell, PhD will serve as the group’s Director, and Laine Thomas, PhD will serve as Deputy Director effective January 1, 2023.
As Director, Chris Lindsell, PhD will lead visionary strategic planning, development, and execution of state-of-the-art research for DCRI to achieve its scientific goals. He will also serve as a member of the Senior Management Team and, along with Dr. Thomas, will partner with Jack Shostak, Director of Statistical Operations, to execute research.
Lindsell has served as the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research Methods program Director, co-Director of the Center for Health Data Science, and professor of biostatistics and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. He is a leader in the application of rigorous methods in the acute care environment, and to the intersection between emergency care and public health. He has led data coordinating centers for numerous multi-center clinical trials, including FDA-regulated trials, and epidemiological studies. His experience spans mechanistic studies, network trials, pragmatic trials, embedded trials, and more.
Lindsell holds patents for using clinical information, biomarkers and transcriptomics for prognosis and prediction in sepsis and septic shock with a goal of precision therapy in critical illness. He has contributed to data standards for CONNECTS, NHLBI’s network of networks for COVID-19 research, and to the DAQCORD guidelines for data collection and curation in observational studies. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed papers, and most recently, he has been leading multiple major data center efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic including TREAT NOW, ACTIV6 and the IVY Network.
As Deputy Director, Laine Thomas, PhD will provide complementary leadership in strategy and development of the group and DCRI. She has an outstanding record of scientific and strategic collaboration, independent research, leadership and mentoring well known to her colleagues at the DCRI.
Thomas joined the DCRI in 2009. She serves as Associate Director for Biostatistics at DCRI and Associate Chair for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion within the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. She is a leader in developmental methods for observational and pragmatic studies. She has over 240 peer reviewed clinical and methodological publications arising from scientific collaboration in the therapeutic areas of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, uterine fibroids and SARS-CoV-2 virus. She led the statistical teams on the HERO COVID-19, ORBIT-AF I & II, ACTION-CMS, CHAMP-HF, and COMPARE-UF clinical registries and secondary analyses of the NAVIGATOR and ARISTOTLE clinical trials. She is the primary investigator of numerous methodological studies arising from these collaborations, addressing methods for causal inference in observational data, longitudinal treatment initiation, heterogeneous treatment effects and clinical trials augmented by external controls.
“From the founding of DCRI, developing trustworthy answers to improve health has been at our core,” said DCRI Executive Director Adrian Hernandez, MD, MHS. “Key to our mission is to develop innovative methods that can be applied in clinical research. The rapid growth in and importance of harnessing health data from diverse settings presents an opportunity as well as a challenge in our dynamic environment. Thus, it is critical we continue to foster and expand the talent and expertise to address the most important health questions with the best methods.
“As our search process finished and as you will see, it was clear that both Dr. Lindsell and Dr. Thomas coming together would enhance innovation from study design and data acquisition to advanced analytics and targeted methods research.”