Rate My Professor Val Gebski

Professor Val Gebski is Professor of Biostatistics at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre, University of Sydney, within the Faculty of Medicine and Health. He holds a BA and MStat, along with an honorary Fellowship of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists (FRANZCR). Joining the Centre in 1988, Gebski has developed extensive expertise in clinical trial methodology, conduct, and analysis, serving as group statistician for several national collaborative clinical trials groups in oncology. He has designed and conducted meta-analyses, established terms of reference for independent data safety and monitoring committees (IDSMCs), chaired international IDSMCs, and prepared reports for these bodies. Additionally, he is Co-Director of the University of Sydney Master of Clinical Trials (Research) program offered through the CTC, contributes to the SMART programme for trainees from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists, and delivers critical appraisal training in the Basic Sciences in Oncology program via the NSW Ministry of Health. Gebski has also served as an expert witness in medico-legal court trials, providing statistical and methodological advice.

Gebski's academic interests center on advanced statistical methods for clinical trials, including designs addressing competing risks in time-to-event outcomes, biomarker impacts, quality of life (QoL) analyses such as time in good QoL and trade-offs with clinical benefits, toxicity profiles using recurrent time-to-event models with ordinal or multinomial outcomes, and equivalence/non-inferiority studies. His major publications include 'Preoperative Chemoradiotherapy for Resectable Gastric Cancer' in the New England Journal of Medicine (2024), 'Assessing the Potential for Patient-led Surveillance After Treatment of Localized Melanoma (MEL-SELF): A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial' in JAMA Dermatology (2022), 'Time to Achieve Clinical Important Differences and QoL Profiles' in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (2022), 'Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to guide clinical care: recommendations and challenges' in the Medical Journal of Australia (2022), and 'Lowering the P Value Threshold' in JAMA (2018). With over 35,000 citations across 600+ publications, his work has substantially shaped clinical trial practices and statistical analysis in medicine. He received the Outstanding Contribution Award from the Trans-Tasman Radiation Oncology Group (TROG) for excellence in clinical trial design and statistics.