Christopher S. Coffey, PhD

Christopher Coffey

Dr. Coffey is the Principal Investigator of the NeuroNEXT Data Coordinating Center, and a co-leader of the Clinical Trials Methodology Course. Dr. Coffey joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in fall 2009 as a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and is currently Director of the Clinical Trials Statistical and Data Management Center (CTSDMC). He received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 and has almost twenty years of experience providing data management and statistical support to large randomized clinical trials. Dr. Coffey also serves as the head of the Statistics Core for the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, and has served as the DCC PI for several large clinical trials. Dr. Coffey has served as the primary statistician for multi-site trials in Huntington’s disease, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, obesity, Parkinson’s disease, pediatric migraine, spinal muscular atrophy,stroke, and traumatic brain injury. He is a past member of the NINDS NSD-K clinical trials study section, serves on a number of Data and Safety Monitoring Boards, is a member of the DIA Adaptive Designs Scientific Working Group, and has been named a Fellow of both the Society for Clinical Trials and the American Statistical Association. Dr. Coffey has published extensively in the areas of adaptive designs, missing data, model validation, and general clinical trial design. 

Dr. Coffey has been actively involved in study design activities for numerous NN projects. For ongoing projects, Dr. Coffey works with the statistical implementation team to provide statistical support, attends Investigator/Steering Committee meetings, and presents all reports and analyses to the DSMB and at investigator meetings. Dr. Coffey has also chaired the NeuroNEXT Executive Committee (NEC) since 2012. He is responsible for the oversight of the aspects of the educational plan related to biostatistics and data management in the Clinical Trials Methodology Course, in which he serves as a core faculty member, and co-leads small groups.