Fong Wang Clow to Receive Lagakos Alumni Award

We are extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Fong Wang Clow, SM ’86, ScD ’89, will be the recipient of the 2019 Lagakos Distinguished Alumni Award.

She will receive this honor and deliver a lecture on:

Thursday, October 3, 2019
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School
4:00pm – Lecture in Pechet Room (Coffee & Tea served at 3:30pm)
5:30 PM – Reception in Elements Café


After receiving her doctorate degree in 1989 under the direction of Nan Laird, Dr. Clow worked for Syntex, Genentech, and several other biotech and private-equity companies. She led the approval process for seven Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cancer treating drugs and created the only FDA-approved treatment for stroke, effectively saving tens of thousands of lives. Dr. Clow also volunteered for the National Institutes of Health for seven years on two data safety monitoring committees and two grant review committees. She is now Senior Vice President and Head of Biometrics and Data Management at Pharmacyclics, an AbbVie Company in California.

While the Lagakos Alumni Award recipient has often been awarded to an individual with a distinguished career in academia, Dr. Clow’s career represents the extraordinary impact our students have in industry as well. Her exemplary leadership in biomedical research has had an enduring impact on the practice of statistics, particularly in the critical areas of drug development and approval. Her success is due in part to the determination, creativity, intelligence and courage she has displayed throughout her graduate and professional career. In an exceptional example of generosity, she and her husband, Eric Clow, established the Fong Wang Clow Doctoral Fellowship Fund for Biostatistics, to honor Nan Laird and give back to the Department.

In addition to Dr. Clow’s achievements and success, it is her compassion, humility and generosity that exemplify the true spirit of this award and represent the attributes we hope for our students to embody.