Rate My Professor Claire Cameron

Research Associate Professor Claire Cameron is the Director of the Biostatistics Centre in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. She holds a BSc(Hons), DipGrad, MSc, and PhD from the University of Otago. Her MSc thesis in 1994 employed a multi-state mark-recapture model to estimate the survival rate of Hector's dolphins around Banks Peninsula. Her 2009 PhD investigated open population capture-recapture models to estimate diabetes prevalence and incidence in Otago. A statistician since 1990, initially in official statistics, she taught first- and second-year statistics at Otago for many years before joining the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine in 2010. She has been a member of the Biostatistics Centre since its inception in 2017 and assumed the directorship in May 2024.

Cameron's research specializations encompass biostatistics, public health, and epidemiology, with particular expertise in the methods and design of health-related research. She leads a team that supports Health Sciences researchers on the Dunedin campus from project design through to publication. Her contributions include over 100 publications in high-impact journals such as The Lancet Infectious Diseases, many heavily cited, and securing substantial grants from the Health Research Council of New Zealand. She has authored a dozen statistics primers for the New Zealand Medical Student Journal. Recent key publications include 'Reflections of their homelands: Early life enamel formation disruption in nineteenth century settlers of Otago, New Zealand' (2026, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand) and 'Woven: The intersections of disability and doctoral study, and the lives of students who navigate these intersections' (2026, Studies in Graduate & Postdoctoral Education). In 2025, she received the New Zealand Statistical Association's Campbell Award for sustained contributions to promoting statistics, leadership in biostatistics, and community-building efforts. Cameron has advanced the biostatistics field through founding the Box Plot network in 2013, organizing the NZ Biostatistics Symposium (2021) and Conference (2023), leading NZSA mentoring programmes since 2022, and serving as New Zealand's representative on the Caucus of Women in Statistics and Data Science since 2020.