Professor Gunter Hartel

I am a PhD statistician with over 30 years’ experience working in biological and health sciences. As head of statistics at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, I lead a team of nine statisticians supporting biological and medical research at QIMR as well as clinical and translational research at major Queensland Research Hospitals. A major focus of my research at QIMR has been the merging of advanced statistical inference with emerging machine-learning algorithms to develop screening and diagnostic testing which are valid for small to moderate sample sizes common in clinical datasets. Prior to returning to academia I spent 17 years in the pharmaceutical industry supporting drug development and clinical trials. As Chief Statistician and Global Director of Biostatistics at CSL Limited, a global biopharmaceutical, I lead the statistical design and analysis of over 60 international commercial clinical trials in a range of therapeutic areas, including influenza, oncology, ACS, CF and other chronic orphan indications, leading to registrations under TGA, FDA, EMEA, PEI and PMDA. Trials ranged from small difficult to recruit orphan indication trials, to large international multi-year vaccine efficacy trials with up to 15,000 participants. I lead the statistics team supporting the development of pandemic influenza vaccines for the H1N1 swine flu and the H5N1 Bird flu threats, leading to registered vaccines.