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Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award given to David Schoenfeld by Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association Award Banquet on Wed Mar 8, 2017 at Simmons College, 300 Fenway, Boston, MA

 

 

Dr. David Schoenfeld will be recognized as the 2017 Mosteller Statistician of the Year by the Boston Area Chapter of the American Statistical Association (BCASA) at a dinner in his honor at Simmons College on March 8. The award is presented to Dr. Schoenfeld in recognition of his impact on medical applications and statistical methodology and for having built a strong statistical unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has also had impact as an educator, both in guiding the educational program in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health over the past 30+ years and in mentoring and training many junior biostatisticians.

 

In regards to specific contributions, David has an international reputation in pulmonology, developed through the role he served for the past 15 years as the Principal Investigator for the Clinical Coordinating Center for the Acute Respiratory Distress (ARDS) Network. In neurology, he has served as the Principal Biostatistician for the North East ALS consortium which is the world’s largest cooperative group focused on Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He has also provided leadership in clinical trials in cancer, AIDS, cardiology, radiology, immunology, endocrinology and psychiatry. He has served as a member of an FDA advisory committee and on two major international Data Safety and Monitoring Committees.

 

David’s other research contributions include his paper on the Schoenfeld Residuals in 1982 that has been cited over 1100 times. He has four papers on sample size calculation and he is the author of a popular website for sample size calculation (http://biostatistics.mgh.harvard.edu/biostatistics/node/13). He is also coauthor of the commercially available package Power and Precision. He has nine other papers on the design of clinical trials, with at least one related to every disease network that he has been associated with. His research accomplishments are well-recognized by NIH grants he has been awarded.

 

In 1986, David founded the Biostatistics Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and directed it for the next 20 years until 2006. Under his direction, the Center successfully grew to a staff of 25 people, supported largely from NIH funding. He has been a mentor to a great many statisticians at the center. His door is always open and he is often the first person that people go to for help with statistical problems.

 

David is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was one of the first statisticians to be promoted to such a position. In addition, David has been on the faculty at the Biostatistics Department at Harvard School of Public Health since 1977. He helped to develop the curriculum of the doctoral program there, and has had six graduate students at the School of Public Health, either as their principal advisor or as a co-advisor.

 

David also has provided considerable support to industry as a statistical consultant. He was the co-founder with Philip T. Lavin of Boston Biostatistics which is now part of Aptiv Solutions, a major contract research and consulting company. He has represented companies before numerous advisory committees and worked on pharmaceutical product liability suits and intellectual property disputes. The Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association is proud to recognize David for his many professional contributions.

 

Every year the Boston Chapter presents the Statistician of the Year award to a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and has shown outstanding service to the statistical community. In 1997, this award was renamed the Mosteller Statistician of the Year award in honor of the 80th birthday of its first recipient, Fred Mosteller. Individuals from academia, industry, and government who have contributed to the Boston Chapter are considered for the award.

 

A list of past award winners can be found at http://ww2.amstat.org//chapters/boston/awards.html.