NDORMS, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDDoug Altman, a professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, died June 3. He was 69 years old. Altman was revered for his statistical methodologies in medical research and his work to develop best practices for clinical studies as the cofounder and former director of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine at Oxford and the cofounder of the EQUATOR Network.
“Doug Altman was an outstanding researcher who did an enormous amount over his career to improve the quality of medical research,” Andrew Carr, head of the Nuffield Department of Orthopedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences at Oxford, says in a memorial on the department’s website. “His simple message was, if you are going to do research on patients then do it well and report it honestly. This approach has improved standards of care all over the world.”
Altman studied statistics at the University of Bath and was a statistician at the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Research Centre for more than a decade, helping researchers develop ways to analyze their data. In 1986, he and collaborator Martin Bland published an incredibly popular technique to visually compare two ...
