Physicians

Biography

RALPH B. D'AGOSTINO, Sr., is Chairman of the Mathematics and Statistics Department and Professor of Mathematics/Statistics and Public Health at Boston University (Ph.D., Harvard, 1968).

His major fields of research are clinical trials, epidemiology, prognostics models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Council of the American Heart Association.

He is also the Director of the Statistics and Consulting Unit and the Executive Director of the MA/PhD Program in Biostatistics.

He has been affiliated with the Framingham Heart Study since 1981 and is Co-Principal Investigator of the Core contract and Director of Data Management and Statistical Analysis for the study.

He is Executive Director of Statistics and Data Management at Harvard Clinical Research Institute (HCRI), a non-profit research institute specializing in device and drug clinical trials.

He is a Special Government Employee (SGE) to the United States' Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He has been affiliated with the FDA's Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research (CDER) since 1974 as an Expert Consultant to the Biometrics Division, the Over-the-Counter Drugs Division, the Oncology Drugs Division, the Cardiovascular-Renal Drugs Division and the Gastrointestinal Drugs Division. He is also a consultant to the Device Division. Further, he has served on a number of Advisory Committees and was the Chair of the Nonprescriptive Drugs Advisory Committee (NDAC). He has twice been the recipient of the FDA's Commissioner's Special Citation (1981 and 1995).

He has over five hundred publications in peer reviewed journals and is co-author/editor of eight books: Factor Analysis: An Applied Approach, Goodness-of-Fit Techniques, Mathematical Models in Health Services Research, Practical Engineering Statistics, Tutorials in Biostatistics (2 volumes), Introductory Applied Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics Using SAS: A Practical Guide.

He has served on the editorial boards of the American Statistician, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biostatistica, and Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology. Presently, he is an Editor of Statistics in Medicine, Statistical Consultant to the New England Journal of Medicine, Associate Editor of American Journal of Epidemiology and on the editorial board of the Journal of Hypertension and Current Therapeutic Research. He is also an Editor of the Encyclopedia of Clinical Trial.