Tsiatis named inaugural Cox Professor

We are pleased to announce that Provost Arden and Chancellor Woodward have approved the recommendation by the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences to appoint Anastasios A. “Butch” Tsiatis as the inaugural Gertrude M. Cox Distinguished Professor of Statistics.

Butch is known internationally for his biostatistics research, specifically in the areas of survival analysis, clinical trials, surrogate markers, cost of care and quality of life. He has published more than 125 papers and given more than 150 invited seminars over his distinguished career. He also has been highly successful in obtaining major grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and currently serves as a co-editor of the journal, Biostatistics.

Butch received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and his PhD in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. A member of the NC State Department of Statistics faculty since 1997, he is also an adjunct professor with Duke University’s Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC.

As many of you know, the endowment that supports this professorship was made possible by the generosity of one of our department’s most distinguished alumni, J. Stuart Hunter (PhD ’54), professor emeritus in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University.

In his letter notifying Butch of his appointment, Dean Solomon said, “This title of distinction is awarded in recognition of your sustained record of high scholarship and, in particular, your signal contributions to the design of clinical trials. Your appointment as the first Cox Professor pays fitting tribute to the legacy of Dr. Cox.”