Simon Gates is Professor of Biostatistics and Clinical Trials at the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit (CRCTU). He is a Deputy Director of CRCTU and is involved in design, supervision, analysis and reporting of clinical trials in paediatric cancer and a variety of other fields. His main research interests are in improving the efficiency of clinical trials so that they can provide better and more clinically useful answers, more quickly. There are several ways this could be achieved: use of innovative, more complex trial designs, introduction of more advanced statistical methods than are routinely used in many trials, improving the efficiency of trial conduct, and by better interpretation of results and communication of them to clinicians and patients. Simon is an enthusiast for the use of adaptive multi-arm trial designs, and for the use of Bayesian statistical methods in clinical research.
Simon is also the University of Birmingham lead for the Trial Methodology Research Partnership, and the Statistical Editor for the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group.