Janet Wittes, Ph.D. President

Janet Wittes, Ph.D. is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She holds membership in the International Biometric Society (Treasurer 1987-1990; Eastern North American Region, President 1995, Council 2003-), the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, the Royal Statistical Society, and The Society for Clinical Trials (Board of Directors, 1990-1998, President, 2001).

For the five year term from 1994 through 1998, she was Editor in Chief of Controlled Clinical Trials, the official journal of the Society for Clinical Trials. She served on the Editorial Advisory Committee for the journal for ten years. She is currently an Associate Editor of Clinical Trials.

She is a member of many advisory committees, including a large number of Data and Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMBs) for randomized clinical trials sponsored by both industry and government. She chairs the DSMBs for several large multi center trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. She served a four year term as a member of FDA’s Circulatory System Devices Panel (1999-2003) and has been a member of several ad hoc FDA advisory panels.

Her previous positions include those of Biostatistician, Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program, West Haven, Connecticut (1989-90); Chief, Biostatistics Research Branch, NHLBI (1983-89); and Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Hunter College of the City University of New York (1974-82). Her research has focused on the design and analysis of randomized clinical trials, capture recapture methods in epidemiology, sample size recalculation problems in clinical studies, and incorporation of subjective endpoints in clinical trials. She lectures frequently on topics related to clinical trials.

She is an author of many publications in statistical methods and applications. Her publications have appeared in Biometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistician, Statistics in Medicine, Controlled Clinical Trials, and a variety of medical journals.

She received her A.B. in Mathematics from Radcliffe College (1964) and her Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics of Harvard University (1970).