Curriculum vitae

Benjamin Gregory Carlisle

Areas of specialization

  • Cancer research ethics
  • Drug development ethics

Areas of competence

  • Human research ethics
  • Research ethics
  • Biomedical ethics
  • Empirical bioethics research methods

Education

Employment

    • September 2022 – Present McGill Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy
      Montréal, Québec, Canada
      Research Associate
    • January 2020 – July 2022 Berlin Institute of Health
      Berlin, Germany
      Postdoctoral fellow in the ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning in human research; methods and data science support
    • September 2010 – December 2019 McGill Biomedical Ethics Unit
      Montréal, Québec, Canada
      Research assistant in clinical cancer translational research ethics
    • September 2009 – April 2010 McGill University Biomedical Ethics Unit
      Montréal, Québec, Canada
      Website manager

Teaching

  • January 2011 – April 2011 McGill University Department of Philosophy
    Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 237 (Contemporary Moral Issues)
  • September 2010 – December 2010 McGill University Department of Philosophy
    Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 230 (Intro to Moral Theory)
  • September 2009 – December 2009 McGill University Department of Philosophy
    Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 343 (Biomedical Ethics)

Service and communication

  • July 2020 – August 2020
    Co-organizer and presenter, . A free, interdisciplinary academic conference.
  • April 2017 – Present
    Community manager and site administrator, Scholar Social. A queer-friendly federated microblogging platform for academics.
    https://scholar.social/
  • July 2009 – Present
    Blogger, The Grey Literature. Personal blog about: life in grad school, medical ethics, research ethics, statistical methods, and research programming in Python and R.
    https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/

Publications

Presentations

  • Carlisle, B. G. Clinical agnosticism and when trials say “maybe.” Summer School hosted by Scholar Social, 2020 August 4.
  • Carlisle, B. G. and Kimmelman J. The Clinical Return on Patient Burden for Label-Extending Cancer Drug Development. Canadian Student Health Research Forum, University of Manitoba. Winnipeg, MB. 2018 June 12.
  • Carlisle, B. G. and Kimmelman J. Burden and Impact of Combination Therapy Exploration for New Anticancer Drugs. Society for Clinical Trials 39th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR. 2018 May 21.
  • Carlisle, B. G., Mattina J., Zheng T., Kimmelman J. Patient Benefit and Risk in Anticancer Drug Development: A Systematic Review of the Ixabepilone Trial Portfolio The 16th Annual McGill Biomedical Graduate Conference, Montreal, QC. 2016 March 17.
  • Carlisle, B. G. Trial Accrual and Ethics: An Empirical Analysis. Society for Clinical Trials 35th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA. 2014 May 19 (Invited).

Awards and fellowships

  • 2018 CIHR Travel Award (Canadian Student Health Research Forum)
  • 2015-2017 Rabinowitch Fellowship
  • 2009 UWO Dean’s honor list
  • 2003 Rotary Community Involvement scholarship

Software

  • cthist

    Historical clinical trial registry data can only be retrieved by manually accessing individual clinical trials through registry websites. This limits the feasibility, accuracy and reproducibility of certain kinds of research on clinical trial activity and presents challenges to the transparency of the enterprise of human research. This R package, cthist, is a novel, free and open source R package that enables mass downloading of clinical trial registry entry histories and returns structured data for analysis.

  • Drug Trials Visualiser
    The Drug Trials Visualiser is a tool for finding and displaying information about the development of drugs. It was originally designed in 2011 for internal use by the STREAM research group. It downloads trial data from www.clinicaltrials.gov and displays a chronological chart of all the clinical trials in the NLM database for the drug in question. FDA approvals, labeling revisions and other regulatory actions are also downloaded, parsed and overlaid on the graph.
  • Numbat Systematic Review Manager
    Numbat is free software first developed by PhD student Benjamin Carlisle in 2014 to facilitate meta-analytic work for the Animals, Humans and the Continuity of Evidence grant as well as the Signals, Safety and Success grant. It is designed for use in meta-analytic projects in an academic context—managing the extraction of large volumes of data from primary sources among multiple users, and then reconciling the differences between them. It is released as free and open-source under AGPL 3.