About

Hi! I’m Betty and I am currently an assistant professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. My current research is funded by a Forte postdoc grant.

My main area of research is on survival analysis and on the development and application of statistical methods for cancer registry data. My research consists of two broad areas: understanding the determinants that drive inequalities in cancer survival using causal mediation analysis methods and improving the reporting and communication of complex cancer statistics. The latter involves developments in life expectancy measures for summarising the cancer prognosis.

Even though my research is largely driven by important clinical questions in cancer epidemiology, the methods I develop are also relevant to other areas of clinical research. I am a keen advocate of making novel and methodologically more sound approaches accessible to other researchers, which has led me to develop tutorials with a practical focus and using plain language, e.g., a tutorial on different causal effects of interest that could be estimated in the presence of competing events and a tutorial on how to improve reporting of survival regression models. The tutorials are accompanied by statistical code for other researchers to replicate those analyses and extend to their applied settings. Before moving to Sweden, I obtained a PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Leicester, UK and you can find a copy of my thesis here. Previously, I spent 6 months on a research visit to the University of Copenhagen, Denmark where I discovered that I really enjoy working with survival analysis methods. I’m also originally from Greece and this is where I completed an MSc in Biostatistics (from the University of Athens) and a BSc in Mathematics (from the University of Patras).

I am also part of the faculty that teaches a 1-week course on statistical methods for population-based cancer survival analysis as part of the Summer School on Modern Methods in Biostatistics and Epidemiology in a beautiful castle in Italy (check it out!).

I am the main supervisor for PhD student Jonatan Hedberg whose project is titled “Approaches for dealing with missing tumour stage at diagnosis with applications to colorectal cancer and its impact on work-related outcome”.

I am also a co-supervisor for two PhD students:

  1. Anna Oksanen whose project is titled “Loss of life expectancy for patients with malignant melanoma, by socioeconomic groups and sex”;
  2. Emma Söreskog whose project is titled “Health economics of the treatment and prevention of chronic pain and pancreatic cancer: six case studies based on Swedish register data”.

Some other things about me: I spend a large part of my time outside work playing or arguing with my trouble-maker-dog named Nina, I like cycling and hiking but strongly dislike running, I love photography (my plan B), travelling and good food and although I am all in for sunny weather and beach holidays I still get excited with snow like a little child (I guess living next to the sea for most of my life and rarely experiencing snow back then is to blame).