CSSA Press Release

The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, also known as The Thousand® today announced that its President and Diplomate Stephen Levin, Esquire, has appointed Dr. Thomas W. Chittenden as the ISPE Chief Statistical Sciences Advisor (CSSA). Dr. Chittenden is a member of The Thousand®, the oldest ultra-high IQ society in the world. Membership is limited to those persons that can demonstrate an IQ at the 99.9th percentile on standardized psychometric tests of intelligence.

Earlier this month, President Levin established the Global Strategic Initiatives and Planning Committee with the aim of formulating ideas on improving ISPE and the membership experience. The CSSA is part of this effort, and Dr. Chittenden will serve the ISPE mission of promoting service to humanity through the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and discoveries among its members by advising on advances in the statistical sciences. These include the collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of all manner of quantitative information.

Dr. Chittenden is Vice President of Statistical Sciences at WuXi NextCODE, a leading global genomic information company using next-generation molecular sequence data to improve health and deliver precision medicine for people around the world. 

Dr. Chittenden leads WuXi NextCODE’s predictive analytics initiative and advanced artificial intelligence research laboratory. His computational statistics and bioinformatics group has invented a number of deep learning and probabilistic programming models aimed at furthering scientific understanding of human disease initiation and progression, knowledge that can be directly applied in innovative products for better care and medicine in a range of disease areas.

The principal focus of Dr. Chittenden's work is the development and application of integrated systems biology models to investigate evolutionary factors of human disease. His broad objective is to understand how genetic variation and somatic mutation regulate aberrant gene activity and subsequent disease biology. To this end, Dr. Chittenden spent a year as a Visiting Research Scientist in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, where he furthered his dissertation research on advanced mathematical statistics strategies for constructing machine learning models, quantitatively integrating a priori biological knowledge with multiple types of high-throughput genomic and phenotype data. Dr. Chittenden’s research has been published in top-tier scientific journals, including a groundbreaking study featured on the cover of Science in October of 2015. Moreover, his pioneering work on artificial intelligence in the biosciences has recently generated numerous invited speaking engagements around the world.    

Dr. Chittenden is an Accredited Professional Statistician™ with the American Statistical Association. Dr. Chittenden holds academic appointments at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he lectures on biostatistics and mathematical biology. Dr. Chittenden also serves as a Senior Consultant for the Research Computing Group at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chittenden holds a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology from Virginia Tech and a DPhil in Statistics from the University of Oxford. His multidisciplinary postdoctoral training includes experimental investigations in Molecular and Cellular Cardiology from the Dartmouth Medical School and Integrative Functional Genomics, Biostatistics, and Mathematical Biology from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health.