BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Brian Feldman is Professor of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, and Institute of Health Policy Management & Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. He is Division Head of Rheumatology at The Hospital for Sick Children. Dr. Feldman graduated from the University of Western Ontario (MD, 1985) and he did further graduate training in clinical epidemiology at the University of Toronto (MSc, 1994). He interned at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and went on to do a core pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Dr. Feldman returned to Toronto to be an associate chief resident at The Hospital for Sick Children. He stayed there to complete a fellowship in pediatric rheumatology.

Dr. Feldman’s primary focus has been in clinical research in the field of childhood rheumatic disease. Recognizing the challenges involved in the study of rare disease, Dr. Feldman has worked to improve the tools available to assist in this research. He has worked at developing and refining outcome measurement tools for use in clinical trials and in outcome studies. He has developed innovative methodologies for the study of new therapies (e.g., the Randomized Placebo Phase Design), refined and tested powerful existing methods (e.g., Bayesian meta-analysis of n-of-1 randomized trials) and developed ways of applying causal methods to observational studies of rare disorders. Dr. Feldman has made contributions to the understanding of the prognosis and treatment of juvenile dermatomyositis, the cost-effective prevention of arthropathy in severe hemophilia, the course and outcome of systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis and juvenile SLE, and the role of fitness and exercise in childhood chronic diseases including arthritis, dermatomyositis and fibromyalgia.

Dr. Feldman’s research, by its nature, is collaborative. As such he is a member of the Pediatric Rheumatology Collaborative Study Group, the Canadian Alliance of Pediatric Rheumatology Investigators, the International Myositis Assessment Criteria study group, and other collaborative organizations. He was one of the founding members of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA), and was the head of the protocol evaluation subcommittee and chair of the Juvenile Dermatomyositis subcommittee.

What is your interest in clinical trials?
• I am interested in methods development, Bayesian methods, rare disease, n- of-1 designs, multiple baseline designs, randomized placebo phase design, etc.

Why do you think clinical trials are important?
• I’m all about counterfactual reasoning about causation. Clinical trials (experimental methods) provide the clearest counterfactual mimics.

What is your personal philosophy about clinical trial training specifically or mentorship in general?
• Mentorship and training should be led by the students’ interest.

FUN FACT: I’m a small-time horse breeder.