Robert J. Gray, PhD
Group Statistician, Therapeutics

Robert J. Gray, PhD, has been Group Statistician for the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group since 2000. Under his leadership, the ECOG-ACRIN Biostatistics Center, located at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston, participates in designing and analyzing dozens of clinical trials of cancer therapies at any given time. One notable example is TAILORx, the ground-breaking cancer clinical trial that defined that most women with early breast cancer do not benefit from chemotherapy (Sparano JA, N Engl J Med, 2015). Others are the ComboMATCH and NCI-MATCH precision medicine cancer trials, assigning patients to treatments based upon the molecular make-up of their tumor cells.

Dr. Gray first became part of the Group in 1982 as a clinical trials statistician working primarily with the Breast Cancer Committee. At that time, it was the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG). He became Group Statistician for ECOG in 2000 and continued in that role after ECOG merged with the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) in 2012 to form the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group.

Dr. Gray is a professor of biostatistics at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. His major research activities involve the design and analysis of clinical trials and the study of related statistical issues. He received his PhD in Statistics from Oregon State University in 1982. He has been a member of the faculty at Harvard University since 1984 and a tenured professor since 2003. He is Chair of the National Cancer Institute's Committee of Group Statisticians, a position he has held since 2003. He maintains active membership in the NCI Breast Cancer Steering Committee and the Breast Cancer Intergroup Correlative Science Committee.