K. Jack Ishak
Jack is responsible for ensuring Evidera remains the scientific leader in statistics, ensuring the application of best practices, developing novel methodologies, fostering flexible and integrated responses to client priorities, and promoting best-in-class capabilities and training internally. Working from Evidera’s office in Montreal, Canada, Jack specializes in predictive analyses to model disease processes that serve as the core of economic evaluations, treatment comparisons, and simulations of clinical trials. This involves capturing the dynamic relationships between various disease markers with statistical models for time-to-event or longitudinal data, possibly with time-dependent variables to capture correlated change patterns over time. Jack also works extensively in the analysis of outcomes in oncology trials; more specifically, relating progression and survival, dealing with crossover using novel techniques (e.g., rank-preserving structural failure time models, inverse-probability weighted models), projection of incomplete survival curves, and sequential modeling of treatment lines. Other areas of expertise include exploratory analyses, methods for measuring the effect of compliance or persistence with chronic treatments, and the design and analysis of observational studies.
Jack is also engaged in methodological research and teaching of statistics in the context of economic evaluations and related areas. He has been involved in methodological developments in indirect treatment comparison (simulated treatment comparisons), complex method for modeling time-to-event curves, crossover adjustment methods in oncology, and novel study designs (e.g., evaluating the benefits of Bayesian adaptive designs in the context of comparative effectiveness research). His methodological and substantive papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Jack received his undergraduate degree in statistics from Concordia University and obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees in biostatistics and epidemiology from McGill University.