About the group

The DRAMA research group was first formed in 2017 by Professor Robert Staudte and Professor Luke Prendergast at La Trobe University's Melbourne (Bundoora) Campus in Victoria, Australia.  The initial focus of the group was on Dimension Reduction And Meta-Analysis methodologies and the name of the group was conceived by Alan Healey, a then Masters by Research candidate.  The group was informally in existence prior to this, with group members contributing research to these areas in the years prior.   Since 2017, the research groups has grown, and in doing so has also diversified its research interests.  In recent years, there has also been a focus on reproducible research and improved accesibility of new methodologies via the release of R packages and web applications.  Members of the group have extensive teaching experience across undergraduate and postgraduate mathematics and statistics, as well as some computer science.

Objectives

The DRAMA research group now has expanded interests, with particular focus on the areas of

• Meta-analysis (e.g., multivariate meta-analysis, accounting for heterogeneity, conversion tools)

• Robust statistics (e.g., quantile-based estimators, influence function analysis)

• Omics data methodology (e.g., integration of omics data, normalisation, missing values)

• Dimension reduction (e.g., Sliced Inverse Regression and related methods, robustness properties)

• Statistics education

• Collaborative research across health & medical sciences