Prof Victoria Cornelius Director, ICTU

Victoria Cornelius is Reader in Medical Statistics at Imperial College London, and Director at Imperial Clinical Trials Unit. She leads the Child Health trial portfolio and is an Academic Lead for the Research Design Service (RDS) London. (RDS London)

Victoria's trials research has included evaluating drug interventions across clinical areas including asthma & allergy, dermatology, and cancer, and complex interventions in mental health and surgery. Her statistical research is in the use of time-to-event signal detection methods to identify adverse drug reactions, and the selection and presentation of harm information in randomised controlled trials. Victoria is passionate about translating best statistical practice into applied research. She has collaborated and led national research projects in laboratory studies, feasibility trials, and early phase clinical trials research to support methods translation. She established the NIHR Statistics Group in 2011 with the support of NOCRI which she subsequently co-led until March 2017. Victoria supervises three NIHR fellows undertaking research in projects covering Bayesian methods and prior elicitation for trials in uncommon conditions, and the analysis of adverse events RCTs. She is the statistical supervisor for NIHR post-doctoral fellows and NIHR trainees undertaking clinical trials. Victoria is a member of the NIHR Academy Doctoral fellowship board and Joint Global Health Trials funding Committee.

After obtaining a BSc in Mathematics and competing a PhD in Statistics in 2000, Victoria joined the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford working on cancer studies. In 2005 she moved to the Drug Safety Research Unit working part-time designing and analysing post-marketing surveillance studies to monitor the safety of medicines newly released to market. In 2009 she moved to the NIHR Biomedical Research Unit (BRU) at Southampton University as a senior statistician working on allergy and respiratory translational research projects, and became Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics at King’s College London in 2011 and the Deputy Director for Research Design Service London. Victoria joined Imperial College London in February 2016 as Deputy Head of Statistics for ICTU and was promoted to Reader in Medical Statistics in 2019, and Head of Trial Methodology in 2020.