Tim J. Cole, PhD ScD FMedSci MAE

Professor of Medical Statistics, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College London

  1. United Kingdom

Biography

Tim Cole is Professor of Medical Statistics at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College London, where he has been since 1998. Previously he studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and from 1970 to 2019 he was employed by the British Medical Research Council at, in turn, the Pneumoconiosis Research Unit in South Wales (1970-75), the Dunn Nutrition Unit in Cambridge (1975-98) and University College London.

His research interests cover the statistics of anthropometry and growth and the factors affecting them across the life course. He has invented several novel growth charts, including the International Obesity TaskForce child obesity BMI cut-offs, and his LMS method is the statistical basis for constructing national growth references in the UK, the USA, WHO and elsewhere.

More recently he developed the SITAR growth curve model for analysing longitudinal growth, which has particular applications in infancy and puberty where it estimates the timing and intensity of the growth spurt in individuals, i.e. peak velocity and age at peak velocity. He has produced open source software and patented the Cole Calculator to simplify growth assessment.

Another of his interests is the use of dental and skeletal age imaging for assessing age in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. In 2011 he acted as expert witness in several cases of Indonesian fishermen accused by the Australian Government of people smuggling. In 2022 he served as a member of the Home Office Age Estimation Scientific Advisory Committee to advise the UK Government on the use of biological measures of developmental age to improve age assessment.

He has also contributed statistical insight to human nutrition research working with colleagues in the areas of infant feeding, child body composition, child bone health, energy intake and energy expenditure, all of which require an understanding of and adjustment for body size effects.

He has a longstanding interest in statistical peer review, working as Statistical Editor with the BMJ for over 30 years, and leading a panel of statistical reviewers for the Archives of Disease in Childhood for 20 years.

Tim Cole has published over 600 peer-reviewed research papers, of which 15 have more than 1000 citations, and 200+ have more than 100, on Google Scholar, with a total of more than 110,000 citations and an h-index of 152.

In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and in 2022 he was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE). In 2015 he won the Royal Statistical Society's Bradford Hill Medal, in 2016 the Rank Prize for Nutrition, and in 2019 the Tanner Memorial Medal of the Society for the Study of Human Biology.

Recent Publications

  1. Cole TJ, Green PJ. Smoothing reference centile curves: the LMS method and penalized likelihood. Stat Med 1992;11:1305-19.

  2. Cole TJ, Donaldson MD, Ben-Shlomo Y. SITAR - a useful instrument for growth curve analysis. Int J Epidemiol 2010;39:1558-66.

  3. Cole TJ, Bellizzi MC, Flegal KM, Dietz WH. Establishing a standard definition for child overweight and obesity: international survey. BMJ 2000;320:1240-3.

  4. Cole TJ, Flegal KM, Nicholls D, Jackson AA. Body mass index cut offs to define thinness in children and adolescents: international survey. BMJ 2007;335:194-7.

  5. Cole TJ. The evidential value of developmental age imaging for assessing age of majority. Ann Hum Biol 2015;42:377-86.

  6. Freeman JV, Cole TJ, Chinn S, Jones PR, White EM, Preece MA. Cross sectional stature and weight reference curves for the UK, 1990. Arch Dis Child 1995;73:17-24.

  7. Cole TJ, Kuh D, Johnson W, et al. Using SITAR to relate pubertal growth to bone health in later life: the MRC National Survey of Health and Development. Int J Epidemiol 2016;10.1093.

  8. Cole TJ. Sample size and sample composition for constructing growth reference centiles. Stat Methods Med Res 2021;30:488-507.

  9. Cole TJ, Singhal A, Fewtrell MS, Wells JCK. Weight centile crossing in infancy: correlations between successive months show evidence of growth feedback and an infant-child growth transition. Am J Clin Nutr 2016;104:1101-9.

  10. Cole TJ. Too many digits: the presentation of numerical data. Arch Dis Child 2015;100:608-9.

Research Expertise

  • Constructing growth reference centiles with the LMS method

  • Modelling longitudinal growth in individuals with the SITAR growth curve model

  • Using bone age and dental age to improve chronological age assessment

  • Statistical peer review