Meet the PSI Board of Directors

Lucy Rowell, PSI Chair 

Lucy  is the Group Head for Affiliate Partnerships, within the Personalised Healthcare Data Science team at Roche with over 16 years industry experience and is the PSI Chair since 4th July 2019! Lucy has worked as a clinical statistician across early and late stage and many therapeutic areas, performing varying roles. She spent 3.5 years being a Global Development Team Leader, leading a cross functional team (clinical science, regulatory, statistics, operations, safety, clin pharm ….)  to deliver complex development programs and has spent a year rotation as a medical manager/commercial brand manager in the Roche UK Affiliate.   

Lucy has been engaged in the PSI Scientific Committee for 8 years. She was the Conference Chair (2017 & 2018) and has sat on the Board since July 2016. She is driven by advancing the role of statisticians within healthcare and breaking down perceptions of what a “statistician” is. 

Outside work Lucy loves doing anything adventurous, traveling the world and going to see live bands. To relax she likes to read, meditate and is experimenting with being a vegan (since Jan 2019).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-rowell-90670273/

Nigel Howitt, Vice Chair and Secretary

Nigel is the Global Head and Executive Director of Biostatistics at Covance, covering Phases I to IV. He leads a department of >90 Biostatisticians from US, EU and China. He previously worked for PRA Health Sciences (Global Head of Biostatistics) and Parexel, and has 25 years of industry experience.

Nigel has been an active member of professional organisations for many years. He has served on Scientific Committee and twice on the PSI Board. He was the Chair of PSI between July 2017 and July 2019, and is currently the Vice-Chair and Secretary. Nigel was also the President of EFSPI between 2008 and 2010.

Outside of work Nigel loves rugby, football, music and visiting the West End. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigel-howitt-6838421/

Anna Berglind, PSI Chair for the Regulatory Committee

Anna is a Biometrics Team Leader at AstraZeneca within the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity Therapeutic Area. She has 17 years of industry experience in pharmaceutical statistics/drug development from both Sweden and the US. She has worked across all phases of drug development, ranging from preclinical/discovery to early and late phase clinical trials. She is currently leading a global team of statisticians providing strategic and scientific leadership to clinical development in autoimmunity projects. She has a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Umeå University in the north of Sweden.

Anna has been on the board of directors for PSI, and the chair of the PSI/EFSPI Regulatory Committee since July 2016. She enjoys the active collaboration with statisticians across the industry and the interactions with statisticians at European regulatory agencies that helps to stake out the direction and drive the future development of statistics in the pharmaceutical industry.

Anna is married and has three marvelous children, 10 year old boy + girl twins and a seven year old little brother. She loves to travel (looking forward to the next family trip which is going to Jamaica!) and create memories with her family, including snowboarding in the winter and snorkeling and scuba diving in tropical waters. She enjoys running and is training for a half marathon in the Swedish mountains later this year.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-berglind-7587403/

Veronique Cadic, Treasurer 

Alexander Currie, Commercial Director

Since completing his MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine at Southampton University in 1999, Alex has been employed as a Biostatistician in the CRO and pharmaceutical environment based in the UK and US.

He has been an active member of the PSI including 5 years organising courses on the Training Committee followed by 2 years as Commercial Director. Alex currently works for GSK managing a team of statisticians in the Infectious Diseases therapeutic area. Alex’s hobbies include going to music gigs and visiting art exhibitions. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-currie/

Amanda Darekar, Careers and Academic Liaison Committee Chair

Amanda Darekar has over 20 years’ experience in the industry and has worked at Pfizer since 2003. Prior to that, Amanda worked for Pharmacia (later acquired by Pfizer) and Quintiles (now IQVIA). During her career, Amanda has been the lead statistician on many projects across various phases and therapeutic areas and in 2007 she also undertook a year-long secondment to Mumbai to manage the Pfizer statistics group there.  She is currently a director within the Internal Medicine statistics group, where she is a Statistics Lead on late-phase projects.

Amanda has been a member of PSI CALC since 2010 and in 2019 took on the role of committee chairperson and is committed to ensuring that through CALC, PSI is well-placed to publicise the value of studying maths and statistics to both school and university students and to promote careers in medical statistics.

Amanda has a BSc in Statistics from the University of Reading and an MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine from the University of Southampton. Outside work Amanda has an interest in art, architecture and enjoys doing pretty much anything creative.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-darekar-380b422a/

Mary Elliott-Davey, Training Committee Chair

Mary started working at Amgen after graduating from LSHTM with an MSc in Medical Statistics. She is currently principal statistician working on both early and late phase Cardiovascular clinical trials. She is also involved in providing training to non-statistical colleagues. The thing Mary enjoys most about her work is that she is helping to make a difference to patients with serious diseases.

Early on in her career, Mary got involved in PSI. She joined the training committee and helped to organise several training courses on topics such as Adaptive Designs and Cross-over studies. In 2016 she joined the PSI Board of Directors and became chair of the training committee. She really enjoys planning training courses to meet the educational needs of the PSI membership, and in recent years the committee have worked to put on more soft skill based courses as well as the traditional technical courses. She also enjoys being on the Board and helping drive the strategic aspects of PSI as a whole, to ensure the organisation meets the needs of the members.

Outside of work Mary likes to spend her time walking her dog – a black Labrador called Jet. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-elliott-davey-b942aa9a/

Ray Harris, External Affairs Chair

Ray is currently Senior Director Biostats at Eisai with a range of responsibilities, including data transparency.  Linking with that, Ray is a member of the Data Transparency SIG. Ray has working in the pharmaceutical industry for a number of years, in different companies, including J&J and Parexel.  Recently Ray has been mostly working in Phase I, but he has working in all phases and across a wide range of clinical areas.

Ray previously Chaired the Publications Committee, was Treasurer in the early 2000s and has been on one committee or another since he joined the industry.

Outside work Ray is still trying to learn Swedish.

Rachael Lawrance, Scientific Committee Chair

Rachael  is a Principal Statistician at Adelphi Values Patient Centered Outcomes team, focused on the analysis and interpretation of PRO data, particularly in the context of clinical trials (3-days a week). She also occasionally works part-time as a freelance statistical consultant, with a focus on statistical work for small healthcare companies. Rachael previously worked at AstraZeneca for sixteen years; most recently as a lead project statistician in oncology projects, including those with companion-diagnostics. Rachael has a slightly unusual career route to becoming a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry, as she has a BSc Biochemistry and Genetics - she started at AZ as a molecular geneticist -- but has gradually been drawn into the world of statistics and enjoys the application of statistics in practice. 

After leaving AZ Rachael was keen to stay connected to Pharma Statisticians and therefore joined the PSI Scientific Committee member in 2016. Rachael enjoys organising events and has been co-organising one-day meetings, webinars & PSI conferences and joined the PSI Board as scientific chair in June 2019.

Rachael loves the outdoors and is a keen fell runner and is also slightly infamous for completing long races (marathon distance and beyond). She has two boys who are currently at primary school so family life keeps her busy too!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachaellawrance/

Tim Rolfe,  Membership Secretary

Tim Rolfe has over 20 years of experience working as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry.  He is currently Director of Risk Based Monitoring at GlaxoSmithKline R&D. He has been part of GSKs RBM team since 2013, providing statistical leadership in the development and implementation of GSK’s RBM strategy within clinical trials.  Tim also sits on the TransCelerate RBM Metrics workstream. Before joining GSK, Tim studied Applied Statistics at Sheffield Hallam University and holds an M.Sc. in Medical Statistics from the University of Leicester in the UK.

Tim joined the PSI Board of Directors in 2016 as Chair of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and transferred to the newly formed role of Membership Secretary in 2017.  He is also currently the Chair and a PSI representative for the Council of Biopharmaceutical Statistics.

Outside of work Tim is a keen, yet thoroughly mediocre, rock-climber and runner.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-rolfe-a6a13a22/

Alexander Schact, Communications Director 

I have studied mathematics and received my PhD in biostatistics on non-parametric statistics from the University of Göttingen in Germany. I authored more than 70 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and regularly speak at international conferences – both statistical ones like PSI and medical ones like EADV. During my career at university and within the pharma industry, I have collected more than 20 years of experience. My career focused mostly on phase III and IV (RCT, observational studies, HTA submission, commercialization work) with some regulatory work as well as some experience in the early phases of clinical development.

I’m interested in a broad range of methodological areas but specifically on making better decisions based on data. As such, I was the chair of the EFSPI/SPI SIG on benefit-risk for some time. PSI provided my with many more opportunities, which I’m happy to work on. At work, I supervise  a small but mighty team of statisticians in a large pharma company. The virtual work environment requires me to adjust my communication style and focus on my ability to deliver results effectively.

I’m a happy husband and father of 3 wonderful kids, who I love to spend time with. In the rest of my time, I love running and listening to podcasts

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-s-75ab664/

Kate Taylor, Conference Chair

Kate is a Principal Statistician working for Amgen and has been there working on oncology products since 2013.  Kate took on the role of PSI Conference Chair in July 2018, so has chaired the 2019 conference in London and will chair the 2020 conference in Barcelona as well.  Not only does she have other pharmaceutical experience working for Quanticate and GSK but she has also worked in market research, where she used statistics to look at new and existing food and drink products.

Prior to being part of the Scientific Committee and becoming the conference chair, Kate has also spent a few years volunteering for CALC where she helped with schools events, the Big Bang Fair and the MSc event. Kate remains keen to encourage younger people to pursue a career in mathematics and statistics and to increase the awareness of our industry as a whole.

Outside of work Kate really enjoys cooking and baking as well as spending time with friends and family.  She also loves holidays, in particular going skiing, but really any holiday will do! She has also just taken up running and loves swimming too, especially with her daughter Jessica.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-taylor-90430242/