Janet Wittes, PhD

Janet Wittes, Ph.D., founded Statistics Collaborative, Inc. (StatCollab) in 1990. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Clinical Trials (SCT), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. For the International Biometric Society, she was Treasurer from 1987 to 1990 and President of the Eastern North American Region in 1995. For SCT, she was a member of the Board of Directors from 1990 to 1998 and President in 2001.

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Controlled Clinical Trials, the official journal of the SCT, she is an Associate Editor of SCT’s current journal, Clinical Trials.

Her co-authored monograph on group sequential trials (Proschan M, Lan K, Wittes J. Statistical Monitoring of Clinical Trials: A Unified Approach. New York: Springer, 2006.) is widely used by students and researchers in biostatistics.

In 2015, Dr. Wittes was honored with the W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting, an award of the American Statistical Association. In 2006, she received the Janet L. Norwood Award for outstanding achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences.

Dr. Wittes is a member of many advisory committees, including a large number of Data Monitoring Committees (DMCs) for randomized clinical trials sponsored by industry or government. She chairs the DMCs for several large multi-center trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is a former member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee (2014–2018) and the Circulatory System Devices Panel (1999–2003) and has been a member of several ad hoc FDA Advisory Panels.

Previously, she was a Biostatistician, United States Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program, West Haven, Connecticut (1989–1990); Chief, Biostatistics Research Branch, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) (1983–1989); and Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Science, Hunter College of the City University of New York (1974–1983).

She is the author of many publications on statistical methods and applications. 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 analysis of safety data from clinical trials. She lectures frequently on these and related topics.
She received her A.B. in Mathematics from Radcliffe College (1964) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University (1965, 1970).