Sixty minutes with...

Florey Director, Geoff Donnan, was onto something when he hired statistician extraordinaire, Leonid Churilov. Together, they have published extensively, changing the way stroke is treated in emergency departments around the world.

I first met Leonid in 2007 when we were recruiting a statistician. Back then, I had a much smaller team and we had researchers doing statistics on a very part-time basis. We were desperate for a statistician to join the team because our clinical stroke research was expanding so quickly.

Leonid is an absolute standout – his enthusiasm, his expertise. He is larger than life, a wonderfully warm, jovial personality. People are drawn to him like a magnet. He is a highly regarded academic and had written books and a lot of important articles. When he joined the team, he quickly generated projects in his own right.

Leonid’s role expanded enormously when the Florey amalgamated. Suddenly he became the statistician to 600 people. He now has a number of PhD students working with him.

We work very closely because my main area of research is stroke. Leonid’s involved in all the projects I’m involved in and we see each other regularly at team meetings. He’s been pivotal in designing almost every study we’ve done. We’ve written dozens and dozens of papers together. Whenever we sit down at team meetings we say to Leonid, “We’ve got this plan for this study, what do you think? Is it okay statistically?” He then helps us with the sample size, outcome measurements, all those sorts of important parameters. If you don’t do this properly, the study is useless and you’ve wasted a lot of valuable resources.

Even though he’s not a clinician or a scientist, he probably understands as much about stroke as I do – he’s absorbed the information so well. He knows an enormous amount about the field of neuroscience and has an incredible breadth of knowledge. He’s extremely bright but he’s also a brilliant communicator of statistical concepts which he imparts to us and our students – our level of understanding of statistics has gone up immeasurably.

Leonid has been one of the absolute anchors of the PhD teaching program we started. We have about 150 students at any one time, most doing their PhD. He teaches each new batch of students the groundings of statistics and particularly study design – how to rigorously design their experiments, either in basic or clinical science.

Statistics is an increasingly important discipline. Every research panel in the NHMRC, where all the grant applications go to be assessed, has a statistician to vet the projects and if they’re not statistically up to scratch then they don’t get funded.

Needless to say, Leonid is such a key person within this institute, one of the most important cogs in the wheel.

My long working relationship with him has been so gratifying. It’s his personality – he’s so enthusiastic, he just loves the science and he’s so easy to work with, it’s just a pleasure. I often refer to him as ‘His Majesty’.”

“ Geoff hired me in 2007 to start a new biostats division and to grow analytical capabilities. My original discipline was the science of decision-making – the application of mathematics and statistics for making decisions and for system modelling.

I came from the Ukraine and started out in maths. used to be a university academic here but then decided it was time to jump the divide and apply my analytical skills in clinical and health care systems. came in at a relatively senior level. For me, it was never a question of whether would fit at the Florey – it just clicked right from the start.

On the first day they gave me an office, an empty room with a desk and chair in it –everything else was being ordered – and two very eager students with burning questions to ask me! It was full-on from the word go, but I loved it. The office was near Geoff’s which was fantastic as it was very easy to talk with Geoff whenever he was around.

I look into very, very applied statistics of clinical and pre-clinical studies. Here, it’s the problems that drive the methodology and those problems are often life and death issues. You can be talking about something in the morning and in the afternoon they’re treating the patients or running vital experiments. It’s really real.

It has been a very steep learning curve in terms of moving into clinical science, specifically stroke. have always felt that if as a statistician I work in a particular neuroscience domain, I need to know about it – in detail. Geoff is immensely helpful. still have one of the books he wrote on stroke that he gave me on my first day. It has some very kind scribblings on the cover.

He’s had an important role as my mentor, teaching me how to go about working with people, bringing together heterogeneous groups, trying to achieve the outcome in a particular way and keeping a strong integrity about it all.

Geoff is one, if not ‘the’ person, in stroke internationally – very big in his field – but he never dominates people, he’s a fantastic team player.

We have a very close working relationship, it’s completely open, honest and based on trust. It’s probably as close to the ideal set-up as you can get. Both as a professional and as a person, he’s great.

Throughout my life I would probably say it’s the best working relationship I’ve had – and I’ve worked at a number of places. I’ve loved every moment. If there’s a definition of a gentleman, I would imagine that Geoff is it.”