An interview with Constantine Gatsonis
Zheyu Wang · Biostatistics & Epidemiology · 2025
Dr. Constantine Achilleos Gatsonis is the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics at Brown. He was born in Velanidia, Kozani – a small village in Western Macedonia, Greece. He came to the US on a scholarship and enrolled in Union College for a year before transferring to Princeton University. He studied mathematics at Princeton, graduating in 1976, then completed a doctorate in mathematical statistics at Cornell in 1981, with the Lawrence Brown as his advisor. After graduation, Dr. Gatsonis had academic appointments at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a visiting professorship at Carnegie Mellon University, where he continued his research on Bayesian methods and also developed interests in Biostatistics. He joined Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor in 1988, to help form the Department of Health Care Policy. In 1995, he was recruited by Brown, where he founded the Center for Statistical Sciences and later the Department of Biostatistics.Dr. Gatsonis is well known for his work with the evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests, including hierarchical models, ROC meta-analysis, comparative effectiveness, and beyond. He has contributed extensively to the development of methods for medical technology assessment and health services and outcomes research. He was the Network Statistician of the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) since its formation in 1999 and the Group Statistician for the combined collaborative group ECOG-ACRIN which conducts multi-center clinical studies across the spectrum of cancer care founded by the National Cancer Institutes (NCI).He helped to establish the Health Policy Statistics Section (HPSS) of the American Statistical Association (ASA), co-chaired the First International Conference on Health Policy Research, now called the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS), and founded the Journal of Health Services and Outcomes Research.He chaired the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the National Academy of Science and was a member of the Committee on National Statistics and the Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. He co-chaired the Committee on the Needs of the Forensic Sciences Community and served on the Board of Mathematical Sciences and Applications and several Institute of Medicine Committees.Dr. Gatsonis is an elected fellow of the ASA and AcademyHealth. He received a Long-Term Excellence Award from the HPSS of the ASA in 2015, the Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2018, and was named Mosteller Statistician of the Year by the Boston Chapter of the ASA in 2019.This interview was conducted virtually over 3 sessions on June 26, July 1 and July 10, 2024. The conversation spans beyond what we eventually included here.