Jonathan A.C. Sterne is a British statistician, NIHR Senior Investigator, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, and the former Head of School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol. He is co-author of “Essential Medical Statistics”, which received Highly Commended honors in the 2004 BMA Medical Book Competition.

Work Sterne has been identified by Clarivate Analytics as a "Highly Cited Researcher" in the last three years, based on multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science.

His research interests include methodology for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, clinical epidemiology of HIV and AIDS in the era of antiretroviral therapy, causal inference, methodology for epidemiology and health services research, and epidemiology of asthma and allergic diseases.

Sterne has led the development of the ROBINS-I tool for assessing risk of bias in non-randomized studies of interventions and the Cochrane Risk of Bias (RoB) tool for randomized trials. He also leads a large collaboration of HIV cohort studies, which has advanced understanding of prognosis in HIV positive people. He also authored a number of meta-analysis software routines used by students and researchers worldwide.Ross Harris & Mike Bradburn & Jon Deeks & Roger Harbord & Doug Altman & Thomas Steichen & Jonathan Sterne, 2006. "METAN: Stata module for fixed and random effects meta-analysis," Statistical Software Components S456798, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 23 Sep 2010.

On 28 August 2019 Sterne, along with Julian Higgins and colleagues, published in The RoB 2 tool in the British Medical Journal, an updated version of the leading tool for assessing risk of bias in randomized trials included in systematic reviews.Sterne Jonathan A C, Savović Jelena, Page Matthew J, Elbers Roy G, Blencowe Natalie S, Boutron Isabelle et al. RoB 2: a revised tool for assessing risk of bias in randomised trials BMJ 2019; 366 :l4898.

Sterne was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2021.

Education Sterne completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Oxford. He holds an MSc and PhD in statistics from the University College London.

References