In memoriam: Ralph D’Agostino.
In memoriam: Ralph D’Agostino
Ralph D’Agostino, a widely respected mathematician whose expertise helped guide global research into cardiovascular disease risk, died at his home in North Carolina on September 27. He was 83.
D’Agostino, a professor of mathematics, statistics, and public health, taught generations of Boston University students in his 58 years at BU and served as the co-director of the Department of Biostatistics’ MA/PhD program for more than 30 years. The PhD in Biostatistics is jointly administered by the Department of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health and the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
He graduated from Boston University summa cum laude and began his career as a lecturer of mathematics at in 1964 while completing his PhD in statistics at Harvard University in 1968. He was appointed a professor of mathematics and statistics at BU in 1976, and served as an associate dean of the graduate school in the 1970s and was twice the chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 1986 to 1991 and 2006-2011.
D’Agostino also served as the director of data analysis and statistics of the Framingham Heart Study from 1985-2015 and was instrumental in developing several risk prediction models for global cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, acute ischemic heart disease, and stroke health risk appraisal. His major fields of research were in clinical trials, epidemiology, prognostics models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research.
Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education at SPH, worked with D’Agostino for more than three decades and said his guidance changed her life. She was assigned to D’Agostino as his teaching assistant and got the opportunity to observe how he distilled complex concepts into digestible lessons for students.
“As I progressed through the program, I started to learn about biostatistics and the work Ralph was doing on the Framingham Heart Study. I joined Ralph’s team and worked on some groundbreaking projects that changed the practice of preventive cardiology. It was such a great opportunity to learn from one of the giants in the field of statistics,” Sullivan said. “Ralph was my dissertation advisor and I spent countless hours working with him. He was a generous and unwavering mentor. He encouraged and supported me to present our work at conferences and to get publications out. He did everything possible to set me up for success.”
While research was a major component of D’Agostino’s academic career—he had more than 700 publications in peer reviewed journals and was co-author/editor of 11 books—he was a teacher and advisor at his core. In 1985, he was awarded the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, BU’s most prestigious award for teaching honor.
Student testimonials included in the Metcalf Cup and Prize nominations attest to the effect D’Agostino had on his classes:
For twenty years Professor D’Agostino has taught statistics in ways that combine deep learning with lucidity and humor. Students who enter his classroom with trepidation leave with astonished confidence: “Professor D’Agostino made it possible for me to understand statistics, something that I thought was impossible.” “Professor D’Agostino’s clarity, obvious intelligence, patience, and wry sense of humor has changed my attitude towards statistics from acceptance to enjoyment.” “I now enjoy, and enjoy using, statistics—something that I had never before imagined.” Anyone who has studied the subject knows that the statistical probability of students saying such things about a statistics course is infinitesimally small: it is obvious that something remarkable happens in Professor D’Agostino’s classroom.
Howard Cabral, a professor of biostatistics, said the advice D’Agostino dispensed was also helpful to colleagues and friends.
“I think of a particular individual meeting during a seminar course when Ralph told me to be wary of anyone who says that they have the sole optimal approach to a research question. I’ve certainly encountered such people in my career and found Ralph’s advice on this to be quite accurate, as was with just about every other nugget of advice that he offered,” Cabral said.
D’Agostino advised many current and former faculty, including Alexa Beiser, professor of biostatistics at SPH, who worked with him to help establish the biostatistics program at SPH and collaborated on various biostatistics projects at Tufts and on the Framingham Heart Study.
“Once, in the early 1980s, I was working with Ralph on a project, and he asked me to go without him to meet with our collaborators and present our results. I demurred and said I wasn’t ready to do anything like that yet, “Beiser said. “He looked at me with a combination of sympathy and sternness and asked, “So, Alexa, just when do you think you will be ready?” For some reason I still conjure up that exchange when I feel anxious about my readiness to do almost anything. He was a brilliant and inspirational mentor and shared his passion for statistics with his mentees. I miss him.”
In addition to his classroom expertise, he also served as a member of several advisory panels for the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and was awarded special citations from the FDA Commissioner in 1981 and 1995 and the Advisory Committee Service Award in 2008. He also served as the editor of the journal Statistics in Medicine from 1995-2017 as well as a statistical consultant to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 2007-2021. The more than 300,000 citations of his published works placed him in the top 1% of cited researchers in clinical medicine. He was a fellow of the American Heart Association and the American Statistical Association.
Timothy Heeren, professor of biostatistics at SPH, said that he came to BU as a grad student in mathematics without any intention of focusing on statistics, but his encounters with D’Agostino helped fine tune his career path. “My first semester (and for several years after) I TA’d for Ralph in an auditorium-sized intro statistics class. Ralph helped lead me toward applied statistics rather than theoretical math, and Ralph also taught me a lot about teaching,” Heeren said.
D’Agostino was a warm person, Heeren said, “but was a bit intimidating in the large lecture class setting – he always wore a dark suit, and had a serious, down-to-business lecture style. But during lectures, he would occasionally detour and relate a funny story or comment, and then go right back into the material, keeping the same straight-faced, serious, down-to-business tone throughout. I remember the students never quite knowing whether they should laugh or not.”
“I think I learned to teach, and learned to collaborate as a biostatistician, from Ralph,” Heeren said. “I was very lucky to have had him as an advisor.”
Beyond his academic career, D’Agostino loved the opera, and for many years was a patron of the Metropolitan Opera in New York where he and his wife LeiLanie would attend regularly.