David Wypij, PhD

Dr. David Wypij is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Statistics and Data Coordinating Center, Department of Cardiology, at Boston Children’s Hospital. He focuses on active collaboration in pediatric clinical research studies and in biostatistical education and administration. He earned his PhD at Cornell University.

In his work at Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Wypij collaborates on randomized clinical trials and follow-up studies that compare the incidence of brain injury after operative strategies in infant heart surgery. The focus has been on the neurodevelopment of subjects as measured through psychological and psychiatric testing, neurologic evaluation, and brain assessment by magnetic resonance imaging, postoperatively through young adulthood. He has collaborated with pediatric cardiology follow-up studies with the International Cardiac Collaborative on Neurodevelopment (ICCON) investigators and currently with the Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Outcome Collaborative (CNOC). Dr. Wypij has also worked on many other observational studies with investigators from the Departments of Adolescent Medicine, Cardiology, Cardiac Surgery, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Radiology at Boston Children’s Hospital,

Dr. Wypij has served as the Principal Investigator of the Data Coordinating Center for some of the largest multicenter randomized clinical trials in the field of pediatric critical care, including Randomized Evaluation of Sedation Titration for Respiratory Failure (RESTORE), Heart and Lung Failure – Pediatric Insulin Titration (HALF-PINT), and Safe Pediatric Euglycemia after Cardiac Surgery (SPECS). He currently directs the Data Coordinating Center for two international multicenter randomized clinical trials. The Prone and Oscillation Pediatric Clinical Trial (PROSpect) is comparing prone vs. supine positioning and conventional mechanical ventilation vs. high frequency oscillation ventilation in children with acute respiratory distress syndrome using a 2×2 factorial design with adaptive randomization. Stress Hydrocortisone In Pediatric Septic Shock (SHIPSS) is examining the potential benefits and risks of adjunctive hydrocortisone prescribed for children with fluid and vasoactive-inotropic refractory septic shock in a placebo-controlled blinded trial. He has also collaborated with the Severe Malaria in African Children clinical research network, involving investigators from the United States, Africa, and Europe.

Dr. Wypij oversaw admissions and recruitment, funding, student advising, orientation, and related student administration activities for many years for the PhD and Master’s programs in Biostatistics at Harvard. Dr. Wypij is an award-winning teacher and has taught courses in categorical data analysis, clinical trials, longitudinal data analysis, regression methods, statistical inference, and survival analysis at Harvard Biostatistics. He has also taught short courses in biostatistics, clinical research methods, clinical trials, and regression methods in both lecture and webinar formats in Brazil, China, Gabon, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and at Boston Children’s Hospital.