Cyrus Mehta
Co-Founder and President
Cyrus Mehta is a prominent biostatistician, and Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He co-founded Cytel Inc. in 1987 along with Nitin Patel. Their shared vision was to make modern methods in statistics and operations research accessible to clinical researchers, by creating quality software for statistical analyses.
Cyrus's efforts helped establish Cytel as an industry leader in exact statistics, as well as in adaptive and group sequential methods. He remains a driving force behind Cytel’s East®, the industry standard software for trial design, simulation and monitoring.
Experience
As one of the world's leading experts on adaptive clinical trials, Cyrus regularly provides guidance and training to leading pharmaceutical companies, academic collaborators and FDA personnel. He has published more than 100 research articles in scientific journals including JASA, Biometrics, Biometrika, Circulation, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and Statistics in Medicine.
Cyrus is an adjunct professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay. Cyrus has provided groundbreaking innovations in computational statistics for rare events and statistical design of adaptive trials. He and co-authors, Dr. Nitin Patel and Dr. Karim Hirji received the ASA's 1987 George W. Snedecor Award for best paper in biometry.
Research
Cyrus was a chief contributor to Cytel's development of permutational algorithms and their applications to categorical data analysis, nonparametric tests, power and sample size calculations, contingency tables analysis and, more generally to inference on the parameters in regression models for categorical data. The same algorithms make it computationally feasible to obtain accurate p-values, confidence intervals and sample-size designs for small or unbalanced data sets and sparse contingency tables. These advances have revolutionized general statistical practices.
His recent research focuses on developing group-sequential and adaptive trial methods and supporting software, including adaptive sample size re-estimation or “Promising Zone” designs.
Awards & Recognitions
- Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (2016)
- Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Indian Statistics Association (2015)
- Zoroastrian Entrepreneur of the Year (2002)
- Received the George W. Snedecor Award from American Statistical Assoc. (1987)
- Fellow of the American Statistical Association (Elected)
- Member of the International Statistical Institute (Elected)
- Mostellar Statistician of the Year (Massachusetts Chapter of the American Statistical Association)