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Research Overview

Since 2012 Adam has worked on applications in clinical research informatics with the Computational Health Informatics Program. With funding from the Australian NHMRC they have discovered and quantified previously unrecognized biases in the production and reporting of clinical trials and the systematic reviews that include them. Much of the focus of this work has been on associations with industry funding and financial conflicts of interest, with related publications in Annals of Internal Medicine, Nature, JAMA, and a series of articles in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. With funding from AHRQ and NLM, they are now developing new ways to address biases, improve timeliness, and reduce waste in systematic reviews, especially in relation to early identification of safety issues in approved drug interventions. In 2018, they developed the web-based trial2rev platform, which provides a large interactive repository of structured information about systematic reviews to improve the efficiency with which they are kept up to date.

Since 2014 Adam has led a program of research in public health informatics, working with the Computational Health Informatics Program and a team at Macquarie University in Australia to study how individual and population-level health behaviors may be predicted from social media data. In 2016, they were the first to show that measures of the information social media users are exposed to (rather than what they post) are closely correlated with HPV vaccine coverage. With funding from the Australian NHMRC, they are now establishing methods for automatically identifying misinformation from the text of webpages and testing novel interventions for reducing health-related misinformation exposure and engagement.

Research Background

Adam Dunn is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Originally trained in computer science (PhD, 2007), his research interests are in applications of machine learning and network science in clinical research informatics and public health informatics.

Selected Publications

https://adamgdunn.net/publications

  1. AG Dunn, L Orenstein, E Coiera, KD Mandl, FT Bourgeois (2019) The timing and frequency of trial inclusion in systematic reviews of type 2 diabetes drugs was associated with trial characteristics, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 109:62-69. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2019.01.009
  2. Q Grundy*, AG Dunn*, FT Bourgeois, E Coiera, L Bero (2018) Prevalence of Disclosed Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research and Associations With Journal Impact Factors and Altmetric Scores, JAMA, 319(4):408-409. doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.20738
  3. D Surian, AG Dunn, L Orenstein, R Bashir, E Coiera, FT Bourgeois (2018) A shared latent space matrix factorisation method for recommending new trial evidence for systematic review updates, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 79:32-40. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2018.01.008
  4. AG Dunn, D Surian, J Leask, A Dey, KD Mandl, E Coiera (2017) Mapping information exposure on social media to explain differences in HPV vaccine coverage in the United States, Vaccine, 35(23):3033-3040. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2017.04.060
  5. AG Dunn (2016) Set up a public registry of competing interests. Nature, 533:9. doi:10.1038/533009a
  6. AG Dunn, E Coiera, KD Mandl, FT Bourgeois (2016) Conflict of interest disclosure in biomedical research: A review of current practices, biases, and the role of public registries in improving transparency. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 1:1. doi:10.1186/s41073-016-0006-7
  7. AG Dunn, J Leask, X Zhou, KD Mandl, E Coiera (2015) Associations between exposure and expression of negative opinions about human papillomavirus vaccines on social media: an observational study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 17(6):e144. doi:10.2196/jmir.4343
  8. AG Dunn, D Arachi, J Hudgins, G Tsafnat, E Coiera, FT Bourgeois (2014) Financial Conflicts of Interest and Conclusions About Neuraminidase Inhibitors for Influenza: An Analysis of Systematic Reviews, Annals of Internal Medicine; 161(7):513-518. doi:10.7326/M14-0933
  9. G Tsafnat, AG Dunn, P Glasziou, E Coiera (2013) The Automation of Systematic Reviews, BMJ, 346:f139. doi:10.1136/bmj.f139
  10. AG Dunn, RO Day, KD Mandl, E Coiera (2012) Learning from Hackers: Open-Source Clinical Trials, Science Translational Medicine, 4:132cm5. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3003682