Marvin Zelen
Zelen was feted recently by the Department of Biostatistics, which he once chaired and where a specially commissioned portrait now hangs. At age 80, he has been appointed as the Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science, a role that will allow him to continue his work. He stays as active as ever because, he said, "As long as interesting problems come up, it's hard to resist working on them." In fact, 27 of his more than 160 papers were published just in this past decade.
This year marks Zelen's 30th anniversary at HSPH. Lured here from SUNY-Buffalo, where he had already achieved national prominence, Zelen brought a dozen other faculty members with him. For 10 years, from 1980 to 1990, he was chair of the HSPH Department of Biostatistics, which grew in size as well as renown. He also established and headed Dana-Farber's Division of Biostatistics from 1977 to 1998, and helped lead the growth of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Program into one of the largest cooperative clinical trial groups in the world for testing new cancer treatments.
HSPH Professor of Biostatistics L.J. Wei noted Zelen's influential, extensive research in disease screening. He also noted the many contributions in clinical trial design and analysis for which Zelen is known. At a symposium in June, Wei described how he "Googled" Marvin Zelen and found 100 pages of citations that provided a snapshot of some of Zelen's contributions:
- the "play the winner rule," the first adaptive clinical trial study design that automatically assigns patients to the treatment arm in a trial once that arm has emerged as more beneficial than others under testing
- contributions to the design of randomization techniques
- a way to model exponentially patient survival in the presence of multiple variables
- a "semi-Markov process" used to calculate and predict phases, such as remission or relapse, in cancer treatments.
Zelen has been committed to cancer research since the 1960s when he was at the National Cancer Institute. He served as a committee chair on planning the nation's expanded cancer program when President Nixon "declared war" on cancer in 1971. He has spent decades coordinating various multi-group cancer trials.
In the past 15 years, he has renewed a previous interest in the early detection of cancer through screening exams. Currently, Zelen is focused on mathematical models that he and a colleague, Sandra Lee of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and HSPH, have developed to predict the mortality benefits of different screening schedules for mammograms.
"With our current technology, early detection offers the best way of prolonging people's lives," noted Zelen.
Another renewed interest is the role of randomization in the analysis of clinical trials. He and Lu Zheng of HSPH have developed new statistical methods that make these analyses more efficient.
He also has plans to expand the not-for-profit organization he founded in 1975 - the Frontier Science and Technology Research Foundation. The Foundation is currently engaged in large-scale national and international clinical trials, which have direct impact upon the treatment of thousands of cancer and AIDS patients in worldwide institutions.
Wei said, "When you care about other people and give yourself to help others, that is how you really make a difference."
In the past decade alone, his honors include: an annual Leadership Award established by HSPH in his name; the Morse Award in Cancer Research; an honorary doctorate from the Universite Victor-Segalen in France; the prestigious Wilks Award and the R.A. Fisher Memorial Lectureship (both awarded by the Committee of Presidents of the Statistical Societies); a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indian Statistical Society; a special journal issue dedicated to him; and three symposia held around the world in his honor.
To him the accolades he's received are not important. "Promoting the health of lots of people, now that's important," said Zelen.
—EB
Copyright, 2007, President and Fellows of Harvard College
