Professor Michel Coleman
BA BM BCh MSc FFPH
Professor
of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics; Head of the Cancer Survival Group
Since 1995, he has been Professor of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He was Deputy Chief Medical Statistician at the Office for National Statistics from 1995 to 2004 and Head of the Cancer and Public Health Unit at the School from 1998 to 2003. He has previously worked for the World Health Organisation at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon (1987-1991), and was Medical Director of the Thames Cancer Registry in London (1991-1995). His main interests include trends and inequalities in cancer incidence, mortality and survival, and the application of these metrics to public health policy and cancer control. He holds a post as Honorary Consultant in Oncology at UCL Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He is Head of the Cancer Survival Group, and sits on the School's Information Governance Board.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
He teaches on the MSc Epidemiology and the MSc Health Data Science, and supervises Master's and doctoral students. He co-directs the annual short course on cancer survival with Dr Claudia Allemani. He is often invited to teach in other countries.
Research
We are funded as the Cancer Survival Group by a range of charities and government institutions in the UK and overseas, to quantify, describe and explain patterns and trends in cancer survival by socio-economic group, geographic area and ethnicity, in collaboration with many research partners in the UK and around the world. We develop methodology and tools for survival analysis. We maintain tools for cancer survival analysis that we make freely accessible online.
In August 2008, we published the first world-wide comparison of cancer survival, including data for 1.9 million patients diagnosed up to 1999 with a cancer of the breast (F), colon, rectum or prostate in 31 countries on five continents (CONCORD study).
In March 2015, we initiated global surveillance of time trends in cancer survival, by analysing individual data for 25.7 million patients diagnosed during the 15 years 1995-2009 with one of 10 common cancers, in collaboration with 279 cancer registries in 67 countries world-wide (CONCORD-2 study).
In January 2018, we updated the global surveillance of cancer survival trends with individual data on over 37 million adults and children diagnosed during 2000-2014with one of 18 cancers in 71 countries (CONCORD-3). Selected survival estimates have been included by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development in Health at a Glance 2017 as indicators of the quality of healthcare for cancer in 48 countries.
Selected Publications
