About the faculty
Donald Maxwell Parkin, M.D., is a world-renowned expert in descriptive cancer epidemiology. From 1981-2004 he was head of the Descriptive Epidemiology Unit at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France where he was responsible for monitoring global patterns and trends of cancer, was principal editor for 3 volumes of the “Cancer Incidence in Five Continents” series, and initiated the much-used GLOBOCAN estimates of world cancer burden.
Since 2005, he has been Senior Research Fellow, Clinical Trials Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, Oxford University, working on quantitative estimation of cancer and the impact of different risk factors (Infections, tobacco, obesity) on patterns and trends of cancer internationally, and acting as consultant to WHO, the EU, the Institute of Medicine, American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute of Thailand.
In May 2006 he joined the Cancer Research UK Centre for Epidemiology, Mathematics and Statistics, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, as a Senior Epidemiologist, where he is responsible for preparing, on behalf of Cancer Research UK a set of “scenarios” for cancer in the UK. This comprises projections of cancer incidence and mortality to the year 2025, with plausible estimates of the potential impact of different interventions in prevention, early diagnosis/screening and treatment. Dr. PArkin is a highly saught after speaker and teacher and has published more than 300 papers in the international literature.
Freddie Bray, Ph.D., works at the Cancer Registry of Norway in Oslo and at the Dept of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo. He has a PhD from the London School of the Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and was previously employed at the Unit of Descriptive Epidemiology, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France. His research interests include the statistical analysis and public health interpretation of time trends and predictions of various cancer forms. He is presently General Secretary of the International Association of Cancer Registries, and formerly, Chair of the European Network of Cancer Registries. Dr. Bray has previously taught highly regarded courses on cancer time trends.
Eero Pukkala, Ph.D., is Director of Statistics at the Finnish Cancer Registry, Institute for Statistical and Epidemiological Cancer Research, Helsinki. He also holds a position of Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at Tampere School of Public Health, University of Tampere and is responsible for the EU international postgraduate education network “Speading of Excellence in Cancer Control using Population-Based Registries and Biobanks”. Prof. Pukkala has more than 500 peer-reviewed epidemiological publications, including studies on cancer and other health outcomes related to physical and social environment, occupational hazards, and life habits; biological risk factors of cancer; familial clustering of cancer; evaluations of the effects of screenings and other interventions; survival studies; cancer predictions; cancer map presentations for numerous countries; methodological publications on register and biobank data quality, data protection and privacy issues (link to publication list).
Prof. Pukkala has been coordinator/lecturer of numerous of national and international pre- and postgraduate courses and educational establishments, and author of educational text book chapters and electronic teaching materials. He was recently nominated to the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks of the European Commission, and he is chairman of the National Epidemiological Society in Finland. Prof. Pukkala is recognised internationally as an expert in methods for spatial descriptive cancer epidemiology, the primary focus of his teaching during this course.
Paul Dickman is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and deputy head of department at the the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet. He conducts research in epidemiology and biostatistics with particular focus on cancer epidemiology and register-based epidemiology. Dr Dickman has long been interested in the analysis of cancer patient survival, the topic of his 1997 doctoral thesis where he studied with Professor Timo Hakulinen. His primary interests lie in statistical methods for estimating and modelling relative survival. He has published widely in the field of cancer patient survival, is a coauthor of the Stata strs command for estimating and modelling relative survival, and taught courses in cancer survival analysis in eight different countries. Current research, in collaboration with Paul Lambert and others, focuses on cure models for relative survival and flexible parametric models.