The Department of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health has named Dr. Revathi Ananthakrishnan (SPH'17) the recipient of the
2025 Biostatistics Distinguished Alumni Award.
The annual award recognizes an alum from any graduate-level biostatistics program at Boston University whose career embodies SPH’s core purpose to “Think. Teach. Do. For the health of all.” This includes notable contributions to the field, such as publishing peer-reviewed articles, teaching and mentoring the next generation of biostatisticians, and doing work that impacts underserved populations.
Think: Revathi has worked on oncology clinical trials at Celgene and Bristol-Myers Squibb (which purchased Celgene in 2019) and has been promoted to the level of Director. She has worked on trials of targeted immunotherapies for cancer, including Bosutinib for chronic myeloid leukemia, Inotuzumab for acute lymphocytic leukemia, JCAR017 for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and Ide-cel for multiple myeloma. For JCAR017, Revathi served as the lead statistician for their EU, Japan, Canadian, and Swiss regulatory submissions. In addition to her work on these clinical trials, Revathi has published journal articles and book chapters, including applied oncology papers as well as papers on innovative phase I/II trial designs, a review of non-proportional hazards in oncology clinical trials, and a review of the different adaptations of the Bayesian BOIN trial design.
Teach: Revathi has served as the Secretary, President-Elect and President of the ASA NJ Princeton-Trenton Chapter. She is a core member of the ASA Scientific Working Group on Cell and Gene Therapies. For the past three years she has been a member of the organizing committee for the Statistics in Pharmaceutics (SIP) conference to motivate early career statisticians to join the field.
Do: These targeted immunotherapies are a new paradigm in oncology treatment and are allowing many more cancer patients to live longer and with a higher quality of life. Revathi’s publications in statistical methodology have been widely cited in addition to her earlier work in Biophysics.
For the health of all: Revathi started work in the pharmaceutical industry based on a PhD in Physics and needed to learn biostatistics while employed. It was challenging for her to attend graduate school part-time and complete MS and PhD degrees while working full-time at Pfizer. However, for seven years she maintained the focus and discipline needed to accomplish this feat. In the years since graduation, she has maintained this determination and focus to publish statistical work and provide service to our discipline while working in the pharmaceutical industry.
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