Dr Stuart Howell completed an Honours degree in Psychology in 1990 and has worked as a research statistician since 1992. Over the course of his career, he has worked in a variety of settings including academia, government health departments and non-government organisations. In 1997, he joined the Department of Medicine at Sydney University to oversee a programme of studies exploring the epidemiology of gastrointestinal illnesses. Following a brief period as statistician/epidemiologist at the Macquarie Area Health Service (Dubbo, NSW), he returned to the Department of Medicine to complete a PhD. Since graduating in 2005, he has held senior positions with the Arkansas Centre for Health Improvement, Queensland Health and the University of Adelaide. He has had extensive experience with large-scale, population-based data collections including longitudinal survey studies and patient-based, administrative data collections. His current interests lie in the characterisation and management of confounding and bias in epidemiological studies.