Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Tufts University, Medford MA	BA	1968	Mathematics
University of Maryland, College Park, MD	MA	1973	Mathematics
University of Maryland, College Park, MD	PhD	1976	Mathematics
Harvard University, Cambridge MA	MA (Hon)	1990	General

Research and other activities

David Harrington was involved in two different lines of research, statistical methods for clinical trials and prospective cohort studies in which the time to an event is a primary outcome and in health services research. He has worked in efficient nonparametric tests and regression methods for right-censored data, sequential designs for clinical trials, and nonparametric methods for estimating nonlinear covariate effects on survival.

Dr. Harrington was the principal investigator of the Statistical Coordinating Center for the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance (CanCORS) Consortium. This NCI-funded study was a network of sites around the country that are conducting a population-based study of access to and outcomes from cancer care, with special focus on ethnic subgroups and subgroups defined by age. Dr. Harrington's primary interest is in hematologic malignancies, and he has worked in that area with Dana-Farber investigators. He and Margaret Shipp of the Dana-Farber co-chaired the International non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Prognostic Factors Project, a collabration of United States, Canadian and European treatment centers. He was formerly the project leader of the Biostatistics Core and Director of the Biostatistics Research Program in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC).

Dr. Harrington served as the Chair, Department of Data Science (formerly Department of Biostatistics) and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute from 1998 to 2009 and Acting Chair of the Department of Statistics, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, from 2012 to 2014. In the Department of Statistics he was co-director of Undergraduate Studies between 2008 and 2015. He was a statistical editor for the New England Journal of Medicine from 2010 - 2021, and was the lead statistical editor from 2016 - 2021.

He is currently retired and, in addition to serving on Advisory Committees, tutors high school and college students in introductory statistics.