Rate My Professor Mark Rutherford

Professor Mark Rutherford holds the position of Professor of Biostatistics within the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Leicester. He earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD from the university and is recognized as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). In addition, Rutherford occupies a visiting scientist role at the Section of Cancer Surveillance, International Agency for Research on Cancer. His primary research specializations encompass statistical methodologies for population-based registry data analysis. Key interests include relative survival methodology, flexible parametric models for large-scale registry data, and developing intuitive cancer survival measures that maintain fairness across population groups like socioeconomic strata or international comparisons. Rutherford has advanced causal inference frameworks for relative survival comparisons, explored population-level cancer burdens, and individual life expectancy impacts from cancer. Recent efforts involve adapting cancer epidemiology techniques to other domains, such as cardiovascular disease, and devising methods for real-time prognostic risk updates. He engages in collaborations for RCTs and meta-analyses, focusing on competing risks, multistate modeling, and survival function extrapolation.

Rutherford has co-authored influential publications such as "Understanding disparities in cancer prognosis: An extension of mediation analysis to the relative survival framework" (Biometrical Journal, 2021, with E. Syriopoulou and P.C. Lambert), "Reference-adjusted and standardized all-cause and crude probabilities as an alternative to net survival in population-based cancer studies" (International Journal of Epidemiology, 2020, with P.C. Lambert et al.), "Temporal recalibration for improving prognostic model development and risk predictions in settings where survival is improving over time" (International Journal of Epidemiology, 2020, with S. Booth et al.), "Marginal measures and causal effects using the relative survival framework" (International Journal of Epidemiology, 2020, with E. Syriopoulou and P.C. Lambert), and "Progress in cancer survival, mortality, and incidence in seven high-income countries 1995–2014 (ICBP SURVMARK-2): a population-based study" (The Lancet Oncology, 2019, with M. Arnold et al.). He actively supervises PhD students in survival analysis methods, including competing risks and multistate models, using large-scale population-based data.