• Professor in statistical methods for observational (clinical) epidemiological research • Member of the Dutch Health Council

More information about Saskia le Cessie

Observational studies

Professor Saskia le Cessie is a broadly oriented statistician involved in clinical and epidemiological research. The focus of her research is on epidemiological and statistical methods for observational studies. This includes different topics, including causality in observational studies, mediation analysis,  instrumental variable analysis, prediction models, competing risks and multistate models, measurement variability, combining control groups in case-control studies, and goodness of fit. Besides methodological research, she aclively collaborates in research projects of clinical epidemiologists and other clinical researchers in order to provide cutting edged statistical analyses in observational clinical studies. Her research in medical statistics and epidemiological methods is generally inspired by these collaboration with medical researchers. She has published many papers (> 350) in methodological and medical journals.

Academic career

Saskia le Cessie studied mathematics at the University of Utrecht and obtained her PhD in 1991 at the University of Leiden. The title of her thesis was: Model building techniques for logistic regression, with applications to medical data, supervisor Prof. dr. J.C. van Houwelingen. She has worked as visiting assistant professor at the Department of Statistics, SUNY at Buffalo, New York, USA and at the Department of Biostatistics, University of Rochester, New York, USA. She currently works as statistician at the Leiden University Medical Centre, at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and at the Medical Statistics section of the Department of Biomedical Data Sciences. She has been full professor at Leiden University since 2016; on September 22, 2017, she gave her inaugural lecture entitled 'Toeval en vertekening (chance and bias)'. She is a certified biostatistician. 

Publications