Principal Research Associate

Email: sb452@medschl.cam.ac.uk

 

Stephen Burgess completed his BA and MMath (Part III) in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He studied for a PhD in the MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, from 2008-11 working on methods for Mendelian randomization analysis. He joined the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care of the University of Cambridge in September 2011. In January 2013, Stephen was awarded a Wellcome Trust entry-level fellowship (Sir Henry Wellcome Post-doctoral Fellowship) to continue theoretical and applied work in the field of Mendelian randomization. In January 2017, he moved to the MRC Biostatistics Unit on a Wellcome Trust/Royal Society intermediate fellowship (Sir Henry Dale Fellowship), and was appointed a Programme Leader Track position to establish a research group in the MRC Biostatistics Unit in April 2017. He was appointed Programme Leader in October 2022. He retains a position in the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, with a 30% time commitment.

Research Interests

Stephen’s main area of research is causal inference and specifically methods for Mendelian randomization: the use of genetic variants to understand whether putative risk factors are causally related to specific disease outcomes (target validation). He is always open to requests for collaboration, either on theoretical or applied Mendelian randomization projects.

Selected Publications

The book “Mendelian Randomization: Methods for Using Genetic Variants in Causal Estimation”, by Stephen Burgess and Simon G Thompson was published by Chapman and Hall in 2015. A second edition of the book was published in mid-2021. More details are available at the book website: www.mendelianrandomization.com. A short course which roughly follows the content of the book is run twice a year, once in the spring and again the late autumn.

A full list of citations can be found at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TAE0DykAAAAJ&hl=en.