Conference

NIHR Statistics Group Conference 2026

Date: 18-19 June 2026

Theme: Statistical integrity in health and care research

Our tenth annual Conference took place in Sheffield from 18th to the 19th of June at The Edge. The event showcased a variety of talks and presentations focused on the conference theme, Statistical Integrity in Health & Care Research.

The keynote speakers this year were Dr Puja Mehta, Professor Olivia Wu and Dr Jack Wilkinson. In addition to some excellent posters and rapid fire talks, the breakout sessions featured a diversity of topics focused on best practice in areas that included:

Patient and public involvement (PPI) in digital data collection
Multiple imputation
Artificial intelligence in research
Core statistical competencies for postgraduates
Tools to assess RCT trustworthiness
Designing diagnostic medical device trials
qPCR experimental design, and much more

All were welcome to attend – it was of relevance to statisticians, data scientists and those with an active interest in statistics and data science.

The conference was held in hybrid format with bespoke technical support offered by Multicord Events team. This will allowed us to stream the breakout sessions, keynotes and rapid-fire talks held in the main conference room only.

The NIHR Statistics Career Development Group hosted an Early Career Morning on the morning of 18th June from 10:00 to 13:00 prior to the main NIHR Statistics Group conference. This was an opportunity for early career statisticians, data scientists, and others interested in quantitative methods, to find out more about the NIHR Statistics Group. As well as a brief introduction to the NIHR Statistics Group, there was a series of short talks from invited speakers, and an exercise to get to know the other attendees.

A unique feature of the NIHR Statistics Group conference is to provide a forum for applied statisticians to discuss ideas and challenges they encounter and much of this discussion takes place within the breakout sessions. The conference ran 12 such sessions. Breakout sessions were approximately 40 minutes long with 20 minutes reserved for questions and open discussion.

Speakers

Puja Mehta

Yale University

Trust, Conflict & Authorship in Academic Collaborations

In this presentation Dr Mehta explored how credit, responsibility, and recognition are negotiated within research teams. Drawing on common tensions around contribution, hierarchy, power dynamics, and communication, she considered how authorship decisions can both reflect and shape trust between collaborators. Dr Mehta also discussed practical approaches to handling conflict, setting clearer expectations, and navigating difficult professional dynamics constructively.
Olivia Wu

University of Glasgow

NIHR BMBR: Better Methods, Better Research – and what that really means

Professor Olivia Wu holds the William R Lindsay Chair of Health Economics at Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment (HEHTA), University of Glasgow and is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Mahidol University in Thailand. She is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Currently, she is the Director of two NIHR Research Programmes – Better Methods Better Research (BMBR) and the National Research Collaboration Programme (NRCP).

In this session Professor Wu described the BMBR programme and its impact on improving the quality of Health & Care research.
Jack Wilkinson

University of Manchester

Too good to be true? Statistical methods for identifying fraudulent clinical trials

As statisticians, we are used to assessing the methodological quality of health research. We are perhaps less used to questioning the authenticity of said work. Unfortunately, it is now clear that many published studies are “problematic”. This term is used to describe studies that are subject to research misconduct (data falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism) or else suffer from honest but critical errors that compromise the integrity of the data or results. Techniques to recognise problematic studies should become part of the statistician’s toolkit.

In this session Dr Wilkinson presented methods for assessing the trustworthiness of clinical trials with and without access to the individual participant data, and described his team’s efforts to create a series of tools (INSPECT-SR, INSPECT-IPD) for this purpose. Methods for trustworthiness assessment are new to almost all of us working in health research, and he argued that we have a responsibility to promote sound methods for this purpose.