Donald Berry is a distinguished statistician and visionary leader in biostatistics with profound influence on clinical trial methodology worldwide. He currently serves as Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and as Founder and Senior Statistical Scientist of Berry Consultants, LLC, which he established with his son Scott Berry in 2000. After earning his PhD in Statistics from Yale University in 1971 with his thesis on Bernoulli Two-armed Bandits under advisors Leonard J. Savage and Joseph B. Kadane, he built an illustrious career spanning academia and industry. Dr. Berry previously held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and Duke University before joining MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he served as founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics from 1999 to 2010 and founding head of the Division of Quantitative Sciences in 2006.
Dr. Berry is internationally recognized for pioneering the application of Bayesian statistics to clinical trial design, fundamentally transforming how medical research is conducted in oncology and other therapeutic areas. His innovative adaptive trial methodologies have enabled more efficient, ethical, and informative clinical studies that dynamically respond to accumulating evidence, allowing researchers to identify effective treatments faster while minimizing patient exposure to inferior therapies. Through Berry Consultants, LLC, he has designed thousands of innovative clinical trials for pharmaceutical and medical device companies as well as NIH cooperative groups, directly influencing drug development pathways across the global healthcare industry. His prolific scholarship includes over 300 published articles in major medical and statistical journals along with several authoritative books that have shaped biostatistical education and practice for decades.
Beyond his methodological contributions, Dr. Berry has profoundly shaped the biostatistics profession through leadership roles including President of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association and service on the NCI's PDQ Screening and Prevention Board, for which he received the NIH Award of Merit in 2010. His mentorship has cultivated numerous statisticians who now lead departments and research initiatives worldwide, while his collaborative approach has bridged the gap between statistical theory and clinical practice across multiple therapeutic areas. Dr. Berry continues to advance precision medicine through his work at MD Anderson Cancer Center, focusing on biomarker-driven approaches to determine which patients benefit from specific therapies based on genomics and phenotype. His ongoing research promises to further refine adaptive trial designs that can accelerate the development of personalized treatments while optimizing resource utilization in an increasingly complex healthcare landscape.
