Anastasios A. Tsiatis, professor emeritus of statistics, has been appointed to the Data and Safety Monitoring Board for the U.S. government-sponsored clinical trials evaluating COVID-19 vaccines. The appointment of Tsiatis and other members was made last year by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), but the membership was only recently made public.
The board, which includes clinicians, statisticians, ethicists and other scientists, has often been mentioned in media reports as the group responsible for reviewing the data from clinical trials and making recommendations regarding study progress and results. The vaccines reviewed by the board have included those developed by Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax.
Tsiatis has also served for many years on the NIAID Division of AIDS Therapeutic and Prevention Data and Safety Monitoring Board, which has pivoted to monitoring NIAID-sponsored COVID-19 therapeutic trials. His areas of research are survival analysis, statistical methods for clinical trials, causal inference and the broad fields of semiparametric models and dynamic treatment regimes.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association and previously served as a statistical consultant for the World Health Organization.
