Scott Berry / President & Senior Statistical Scientist

Scott Berry is President and a Senior Statistical Scientist at Berry Consultants, LLC. He earned his MS and PhD in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University before co-founding Berry Consultants in 2000. He has led Berry Consultants to be widely regarded as the premier Bayesian consulting company in the world.  Since 2000, he has been involved in the design of hundreds of Bayesian adaptive clinical trials of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and has become an opinion leader in the field of Bayesian adaptive clinical trials. Some of these trials have been groundbreaking trial designs, setting new standards for innovation and flexibility in trial design. These include the trials supporting the first fully Bayesian approval by the center for drug evaluation of the United States FDA (Pravastatin-Aspirin combination) and the statistical design for Time Magazine’s #2 Medical Breakthrough of 2007 (Veridex’s GeneSearch BLN Assay).

He is a primary designer of commercial software used in the simulation and construction of innovative Bayesian adaptive designs.  The software is licensed to 40% of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies in the world. The software package, FACTS (Fixed and Adaptive Clinical Trial Simulator), is the most powerful adaptive design clinical trial simulation tool available and has been constructed using his innovative programs and design ideas.

His research interests include Bayesian methods in clinical trials, adaptive clinical trial design, Bayesian computation, meta-analysis and hierarchical modeling. He has more than 30 refereed publications, including publications in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. His 1999 paper on Bridging Different Eras in Sports was recognized with the 1999 JASA Applications and Case Studies Invited Paper Award. He is a coauthor of the preeminent book in adaptive designs, Bayesian Adaptive Methods for Clinical Trials.

He is also a renowned sports statistician. He has published more than 40 papers on statistics in sports, including in JASA, The American Statistician, and ESPN the Magazine. He won the 2007 Statistics in Sports Award, presented by the Statistics in Sports section of the American Statistical Association.

He gives numerous seminars on Bayesian methods and adaptive clinical trials each year. He has been recognized with teaching awards and widely regarded as an accomplished speaker. He was asked to give an Invited presentation at the 2011 & 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings on how to effectively give statistical presentations. He was part of a short course on Bayesian Adaptive Methods for Clinical Trials that was recognized with the 2010 Excellence in Continuing Education Award by the American Statistical Association.