Scott McDonald is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Life Sciences working on the epidemiology of blood borne viruses. He holds a PhD in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and an MSc in infectious disease epidemiology from Utrecht University, Netherlands. Following several years of post-doctoral research in experimental psychology at the University of Edinburgh, he joined NHS Public Health Scotland as an epidemiologist/statistician, primarily working on a Chief Scientist Office-funded project to estimate the past and current burden of hepatitis C infection and the interaction with problem alcohol use in the injecting drug user populaton.
Scott works with colleagues at GCU, NHS Public Health Scotland, University of Bristol, University of Dundee, and other institutions on diverse analytical and modelling studies, principally applied to record-linkage of databases on hepatitis C (HCV)-diagnosed, clinical patient, and drug user populations. He contributed substantially to the evidence base informing the Scottish Government's Action Plan on Hepatitis C (Phase II 2008-2011). More recently he has led analyses of drug-related mortality, studies of patient-reported outcomes following HCV treatment, model-based projections of the disease and economic burden of HCV, and the estimation of recent HIV transmission. In his current research he uses diverse statistical modelling approaches, including classical epidemiological methods, risk prediction models, self-controlled case-series analysis, and Bayesian evidence synthesis.