University of Bremen

The University of Bremen, a mid-sized university, offers a broad range of disciplines and competes internationally in top-level research. With its ambitious institutional strategy the University was successful in the national excellence initiative as one of only eleven universities in Germany. The biostatistical unit of the Competence Center for Clinical Trials and the Institute of Statistics at the Faculty 3 – Mathematics/Computer Science is a vigorous and renowned group that undertakes theoretical and mathematical research in various fields of applied and medical statistics. A major focus of the group’s research is on group sequential and adaptive designs as well as multiple inference for which the group has developed novel testing and estimation methodologies. As part of the Competence Center of Clinical Trials, the working group cooperates with clinicians and health scientists in a large number of trials and empirical studies. The working group is involved in a master program in Medical Biometry/Biostatistics and has extensive experience in the supervision of PhD students in Mathematics with a focus on theoretical and applied biostatistics.

Main research topics: adaptive and sequential designs, multiple testing and simultaneous confidence intervals, enrichment designs, non-inferiority trials, survival and multi-state models, causal inference, robust regression, statistical methods in laboratory medicine

Key Personnel:

Prof. Dr. Werner Brannath
Supervisor: Bias and precision in early phase adaptive studies and its consequences for the decisions about conducting and designing confirmatory studies
Co-supervisor: Predictive probability of success, as a criterion at clinical development milestones
Prof. Dr. Werner Brannath is full professor at the Department of Mathematics (Faculty 3 – Mathematics/Computer Science) at the University of Bremen and head of the biostatistics unit of the Institute of Statistics and the Competence Center of Clinical Trials. He has a PhD in mathematics from the University of Vienna and habilitated at the Medical University of Vienna where he worked as scientific assistant and associated professor. He served as associated editor for the Biometrical Journal and has experience with the supervision of a large number of bachelor, master and PhD theses.

Dr. Georg Gutjahr
Supervisor: Interval estimation for dose-finding studies
Dr. Georg Gutjahr is research associate at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bremen. He has a PhD in statistics from the University of Vienna. He has developed statistical methodology for adaptive designs and dose response studies and co-authored a large number of medical studies.

IDEAS PhD Projects supervised and located at the KKSB:

• Project 10: Bias and precision in early phase adaptive studies and its consequences for the decisions about conducting and designing confirmatory studies
• Project 11: Interval estimation for dose-finding studies