Janet Wittes

Janet Wittes
President, Statistics Collaborative, Inc.

Educational Background
PhD, MA, Harvard University
AB, Mathematics, Radcliffe College

Janet Wittes grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, the sister of two younger brothers. Her father was a professor of chemistry, her mother a school psychologist.

At Radcliffe College, her major was biochemistry until her faculty mentor, John Edsall, noted her preference for inference over experiment and guided her to statistics. She has been forever grateful to him, as she never would have known about statistics if it were not for his perceptive understanding of her.

Wittes was supported by a traineeship from the United States Public Health Service (USPHS)—which she chose because its application form was short—at Harvard, where she was a graduate student in statistics and her doctoral adviser was Theodore Colton. She felt an obligation to the USPHS, which led her to biostatistics.

With two toddlers in tow, the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1970. There, her husband, physician Robert E. Wittes, served in the USPHS Commissioned Corps as a Yellow Beret during the Vietnam War and she worked part time as a postdoctoral researcher with Jerome Cornfield at The George Washington University. From 1970 to 1972, she was a part-time instructor of epidemiology at Columbia University. From 1974 through 1982, she was a full-time faculty member in the mathematics department at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

The family returned to Bethesda (now with three children) in 1983, when Wittes became chief of the Biostatistics Research Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Her husband left his position in New York to head a large program at the National Cancer Institute. The seesaw flipped in 1989, however, when her husband changed employment and she followed him to join the cooperative studies program at the Department of Veterans Affairs in West Haven, Connecticut. Returning a year later to Washington and unable to find a suitable position, she founded a consulting firm, Statistics Collaborative. As of 2020, she remains president of the firm.

Wittes is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Society for Clinical Trials. She was editor-in-chief of Controlled Clinical Trials from 1990 to 1995. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Wittes’ early research dealt with capture-recapture methods in epidemiology. Later, her focus switched to clinical trials. In 2006, she received the Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences. The American Statistical Association awarded her the 2015 W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting “for exceptional contributions to advancing the science and art of statistical consulting and collaboration; for developing innovative, widely used, statistical methodology; for major worldwide accomplishments, especially in the area of clinical trials, including performing creative, easily interpretable interim analyses and serving on numerous data and safety monitoring boards; for extraordinary leadership as president of Statistics Collaborative; and for being a true beacon for integrity.”

She is a strong believer in taking advantage of surprising opportunities that arise seemingly by chance.