Cyrus Mehta, Ph.D. - Founder and President

An influential biostatistical thought leader, Dr. Mehta has concentrated his research on developing innovative methods and software for flexible clinical trial designs and non-parametric exact statistics.

Dr. Mehta has been a chief contributor to Cytel's development of permutational algorithms which can be  applied to categorical data analysis,  nonparametric tests, power and sample size calculations, the analysis of contingency  tables and,  more  generally,  to inference  concerning  the parameters  of regression models for categorical data.

The same algorithms have made it computationally feasible to obtain accurate
p-values,  confidence intervals,  and  sample-size  designs  for  small  or unbalanced data sets and  for sparse  contingency tables. These  innovations have revolutionized general statistics practices.

Dr. Mehta’s recent research centers on adaptive and group sequential clinical trial methods and advanced trial design tools. He is chiefly responsible for developing Cytel's East® system, the most widely used software for designing and simulating clinical trials. He regularly provides trial design training at major biopharmaceutical companies, universities, and government agencies, including the FDA.

Dr. Mehta has published over 70 papers in journals including JASA, Biometrika and Statistics in Medicine. He and co-authors, Dr. Nitin Patel and Dr. Karim Hirji received the 1987 George W. Snedecor Award from the American Statistical Association. Dr. Mehta is an elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and was named the Mosteller Statistician of the Year by the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Statistical Association.

Dr. Mehta has been a member of the faculty in the Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health since 1979. Previously he taught at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Mehta holds degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mehta is the Zoroastrian representative on Harvard University's Board of Ministry.

Nitin Patel, Ph.D. - Founder, Chairman, and Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Patel is a recognized expert on the development of fast and accurate computer algorithms to implement computationally intensive statistical methods.

At  Cytel, he has  played a leading role in the  development of  StatXact and LogXact, widely used pioneering software for exact nonparametric inference, as well as XLMiner, a data mining software for Excel. He has published over sixty-five refereed papers in the areas of statistics, operations research and computing and co-authored a book on data mining for end-users. Along with Dr. Cyrus Mehta and Dr. Karim Hirji, his co-authors, he received the 1987 George W. Snedecor Award from the American Statistical Association. Dr. Patel is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Dr. Patel has been a visiting professor at MIT since 1995. Previously, he was CMC chair professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Montreal and the University of Pittsburgh. He won India's Vikram Sarabhai Medal for systems analysis research in 1985. He has served as President of the Operations Research Society of India, and as Vice President of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies. He was a co-founder of Tata Consultancy Services, a leading Indian software company and is a Fellow of the Computer Society of India. Dr. Patel co-founded Cytel Software with Dr. Cyrus Mehta in 1987. He holds a Ph.D degree in Operations Research from MIT.