Alasdair's career in statistics began in 1992 when they joined the then Scottish Office Agriculture and Fisheries Department's Economics and Statistics Unit, leading a small team producing government statistics, running government surveys and providing economic and statistical advice on the aggregate Scottish agricultural economy.

A few years later, they moved to the Scottish Office's Central Statistics Unit where they took over the production of the department's flagship publication, "The Scottish Abstract of Statistics", leading a small team reviewing its content and revamping its presentation. Their team also produced government environment, planning and local government staffing statistics.

From there, they moved into further education funding policy, helping to set up the then new Scottish Further Education Funding Council. They developed and ran the funding model which calculated FE college funding from various statistical inputs as well as advising on and developing the policy behind it. They managed contracted researchers working on projects commissioned by the funding council. They also had a role in the abolition of the full-time FE tuition fee in Scotland.

During a career break to raise their three children, Alasdair was secretary and trustee of a small charity, Alfreton's Party in the Park, working with a committee, leading volunteers to organise charitable events including an annual rock festival and fair on the town's park.

After completing a Master's degree in Statistics with Medical Applications at Sheffield, they returned to Scotland to complete a PhD in Statistics in Glasgow, developing Bayesian models of population-level genetic drift, taking their total number of degrees to seven. At the same time they were involved in teaching the programming language R and courses in probability theory.

They became a Research Assistant at the School of Maths and Statistics working on a Bayesian model of air pollution commissioned by the Scottish Government. It used data including information from monitoring sites to produce maps of air pollution and to forecast probabilities of exceeding thresholds for four pollutants at a range of geographic levels of aggregation including a 1-kilometre-square grid. This was developed and documented into a software product that was delivered to the Scottish Government.

Alasdair now works in the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics in the School of Health and Wellbeing working on the design, implementation, monitoring, analysis and publication of clinical trials and other health-related studies and datasets. They worked on the award-winning DiRECT trial of a dietary intervention for type 2 diabetes. They also teach and develop content on a range of courses including Introduction to Clinical Trials as well as supervising student projects on the Masters of Public Health program. They present work at external conferences, winning the "Best Poster" prize at the NIHR Statistics conference in 2026.

Alasdair's interests in recent years have been quite varied and have included:

• statistical genetics,
• air pollution modelling and
• clinical trial design including newer approaches such as adaptive designs, Bayesian methods, platform, basket and umbrella trials.

These interests have led to the use of, and expertise in, a wide range of amalytical methods alongside standard statistical hypothesis testing and generalised linear models such as Poisson and logistic regression:

• Bayesian hierarchical models,
• Lasso and other forms of penalised regression,
• Naive Bayes,
• Agent-based models,
• Deep neural networks,
• Random forests and
• Extreme gradient boosting.

These methods have been implemented through a range of programming approaches including the development of multithreaded code. They have also been involved in software development. Programming languages used over the years include, but are not limited to:

• R,
• C++,
• Python,
• Stata,
• JavaScript,
• SAS,
• Java and
• BASIC.

List by: Type | Date

Grants and Awards listed are those received whilst working with the University of Glasgow.

• A community-based dietary programme for type 2 diabetes prevention and remission, clinical trial and implementation evaluation in Nepal (Co-DiaPREM-NEPAL)
  National Institute for Health Research
  2025 - 2029
   
• HoDiRECT- Nepal: a food based intervention for type 2 diabetes remission in hospital patients with type 2 diabetes
  All Saints Educational Trust
  2021 - 2023
   

Master's of Public Health Projects

Jiayi Li - Ethnic differences in poor sleep and stroke risk: A UK biobank study (2025)

Aiko Mori - Relationship between sleep and blood-based pathologic biomarkers of Alzheimer's Disease: A cross-sectional and longitudinal study from UK Biobank (2025)

Yifei Dou - Trends in Life Expectancy of HIV Patients Receiving HAART: A systematic review and Meta-Analysis (2024)

Teaching (Ongoing)

Introduction to Clinical Trials - All lectures

Introduction to Epidemiology and Statistics (Masters of Public Health MED5652) - Linear statistical regression lecture

Advanced Statistics (Masters of Public Health MED5021) - Multivariable generalised linear statistical regression lecture

BSc (MedSci) Clinical Medicine - Journal Club Facilitator

Previous Teaching (when employed by the School of Mathematics and Statistics)

Introduction to R - Lab Practicals

Statistics 2R: Probability (STATS2002) - Tutorials + Labs

Statistics 2X: Probability II (STATS2005) - Tutorials + Labs

Statistics Project - Drop in programming support