Matthias Egger is professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Bern in Switzerland, as well as professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
Egger completed his clinical training at the University of Bern and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He joined the faculty of the University of Bern in 2002, and also became a professor at the University of Bristol that year. Since January 2017, Matthias Egger is president of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In 1997, he published a paper describing a method for detecting bias in meta-analyses by analyzing funnel plots. This paper has been cited more than 16,500 times on Google Scholar as of August 2016.
In 2005, Egger published a study comparing 110 trials of homeopathy with 110 trials of conventional medicine in the Lancet. It found that there was strong evidence that conventional medicine was more effective than placebo, but only weak evidence that homeopathy was. He told WebMD that in this study, « The effect of homeopathy disappears if you look only at large, good trials; whereas the conventional medicines’ effect is still there. »