Medical Statistics MSc

Course description

This postgraduate degree will give you all the expertise you need to become a practising medical statistician. You will cover all relevant theory but with an emphasis on understanding, applying and adapting it to real-life circumstances. Your analysis skills will be developed on real medical data sets, using statistical software such as Stata, R, SAS and WinBUGS.

An important factor in the success of a practising statistician is the ability to communicate with others. To develop these skills, you will work on two mini-projects and will be introduced to consultancy skills throughout the course. The mini-projects involve analysing data arising from real problems and data sets and presenting a report on the findings.

Teaching and learning

Each module is taught in a week-long blocks using a variety of lectures, seminars and computer practicals, including sessions delivered by external practising medical statisticians. In between these teaching weeks you will complete the course work from the previous teaching weeks and start your preliminary reading for the next one.

Assessment is by coursework and exam. Many modules have an assessed coursework element involving the analysis of a real medical data set and the production of a concise written report. There are also mathematical and statistical computing-based courseworks.

Careers and employability

The demand for medical statisticians is high and many employers contact us with job opportunities and to give careers talks to try to recruit graduates.

The course is intended mainly for students with a good honours degree of which mathematics/statistics is the main subject, and with a working knowledge of basic probability and statistics. However, applicants with other suitable backgrounds will be considered by the course team.