Ivonne Solis-Trapala

Biography

I am the Director of Keele Clinical Trials Unit and a Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics at Keele's School of Medicine. My research centres on applying state-of-the-art statistical methods such as graphical modelling, multistate modelling, and clinical trials methodology across various fields. These fields include health services research, psycho-oncology, nutrition, and global mental health.

Since 2023, I have been a subject matter expert for the World Health Organisation on the GSED project which aims to develop global measures for evaluating early childhood development.
I serve as Co-Director of the NIHR Research Support Service Hub delivered by the University of Birmingham and Partners. This hub is part of a national research infrastructure that provides support for the development and delivery of clinical and applied health and social care research in England.

Starting in 2024, I will serve as an expert member of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment Commissioning Funding Committee.

I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the University of Cambridge in 2004. I held a 4-year MRC Career Development Fellowship in Biostatistics at Lancaster University from 2008 to 2012. Before joining Keele in 2015, I was the Head of the Biostatistics Team at MRC Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge. From 2016 to 2023, I served as the Deputy Director of the Keele Hub of the NIHR Research Design Service for the West Midlands.

Research and scholarship

My research centres on applying state-of-the-art statistical methodology such as graphical modelling, which employs causal graphs to represent causal relationships, multistate modelling for the analysis of time-to-event data, and clinical trials methodology. My collaborative work spans across various fields, including health services research, psycho-oncology, nutrition, and global mental health.

Drawing upon my expertise on graphical models, acquired during an MRC Fellowship in Biostatistics that I held at Lancaster University, 2008-2012, I have pioneered the application of the “sequences of regressions” graphical model and its associated causal graph for the analysis of complex data such as real-world evidence, clinical trials, and registry data. For instance, in Lawson et al (2018, PLOS Medicine) I led the development of a causal graph that depicted the relative impact of a patient’s cardiovascular (CV) and non-CV comorbidities on quality of life in patients with heart failure, utilising data from the Swedish Heart Failure Register. We showed that non-CV comorbidities can significantly outweigh CV conditions in their impact on patients' quality of life. This insight has contributed to the enhancement of care for patients with heart failure (Heart Failure Policy Network, 2022).

In collaboration with Professors Fallowfield and Jenkins (University of Sussex), I have established a strong track record in generating clinical trial evidence on the efficacy of educational programmes focused on communication skills for health care professionals. Our work has informed policy and has been adopted worldwide.

Since 2023, I have been a subject matter expert to the World Health Organisation working group that developed the Global Scale for Early Development (GSED) tool for use in population monitoring and programmatic evaluation of early childhood development. We are currently evaluating the psychometric properties of the tool in new populations and creating global norms and standards.

I have been principal investigator or co-investigator of external grants totalling over £29m from NIHR, MRC, ESRC, Horizon 2020 EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Teaching

I lead and co-supervise PhD students in Biostatistics and Medical Sciences as well as MPhil and Medical Doctoral students.

Further information

I am a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a member of the International Biometric Society, British and Irish region, and a member of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics. I am a member of the UKCRC Registered CTU Directors Network, and I chair or sit on several external Trial Steering Committees and Data monitoring Committees for national randomised controlled trials.

I review for leading peer-reviewed journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, the BMJ, Nature Communications, Biostatistics and Statistics in Medicine) and multiple grant funding bodies including the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.