Dr. Clement Ma
CAMH
Dr. Clement Ma is the Scientific Head of the Biostatistics Core Services at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He completed his Ph.D. and post-doctoral training in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan in 2015. He was the Lead Biostatistician at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School from 2015 to 2020.
Dr. Ma’s research focuses on developing and implementing innovative statistical methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of clinical trials. Previously in pediatric oncology, he developed the novel Bayesian adaptive TARGETed-agent Continual Reassessment Method (TARGET-CRM) to prioritize the enrollment of children with specific rare tumour mutations who were more likely to benefit from the molecularly-targeted therapy. He also developed the two-stage subgroup-specific time-to-event (2S-Sub-TITE) design for phase 1 trials with two or more heterogeneous patient subgroups. In collaboration with clinician-scientists, he implemented both designs in three ongoing pediatric cancer trials. At CAMH, Dr. Ma is developing new statistical methods to design and conduct mental health trials that maximize accuracy while minimizing patient resources and trial duration.
Dr. Ma has extensive experience in statistical consulting in clinical research. He previously served as the lead statistician for 10 prospective clinical trials of experimental therapies. He developed the first-ever prognostic risk classification system for NUT carcinoma, an aggressive head & neck cancer, using data from a rare disease registry. He is experienced in the design and analysis of retrospective and survey studies assessing health disparities and quality of life. He also led the meta-analysis of DNA sequencing data from international genetic association studies of type 2 diabetes. At CAMH, Dr. Ma collaborates closely with clinician-scientists in clinical research studies of mental health and addiction.