DrNicole De La Mata

Dr Nicole De La Mata, BSc (Biology), MBiostats, PhD (epidemiology/biostatistics) is a mid-career biostatistician researcher and senior lecturer in biostatistics at the University of Sydney. Her expertise lies in establishing data linkage studies and using these to apply advanced statistical models to understand patient journeys and complex clinical scenarios. Her work has broadly aimed to improve health service quality and efficiency to translate into better and more equitable patient outcomes.

Her research program has focused on access to and delivery of health care services, and subsequent implications on outcomes, for people with chronic diseases. She has established several new enduring health datasets that utilise existing health data to provide a holistic picture of health service delivery among patients with HIV, kidney disease and organ transplant recipients. She a project lead or lead statistician across 8 studies, most of which are data linkage studies and competitively funded. In the last 5 years, she has secured $1.67 million in national and international research funding through competitive peer-review processes, of which $895k she was a chief investigator.

By 2022, she has 34 journal publications in leading epidemiological and health services research journals, including The BMJ and Medical Journal of Australia, with the majority published in Q1 medical journals (based on SJR). She has over 400 citations with a field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) 25% above the world average and with an H-index of 10 (10 publications cited at least 10 times). In the past 5 years, she has been involved in 78 conference presentations, both nationally and internationally, and received 4 conference awards for her top-ranking abstracts (3 international). She was also a finalist for the NSW Health Scientific Talent Competition in 2020.