David Wypij, PhD

Dr. David Wypij is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, associate professor in biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and senior biostatistician at Boston Children’s Hospital. He focuses on leadership and active collaboration in pediatric clinical trials and observational studies in cardiology and cardiac surgery, ICU management, and neurodevelopment and in biostatistical education and administration. He earned his PhD at Cornell University.

At Boston Children’s, Dr. Wypij has collaborated on a series of randomized clinical trials and follow-up studies that compare the incidence of brain injury after operative strategies in infant heart surgery. The focus has been on neurodevelopment as measured through neuropsychological and psychiatric testing, neurologic evaluation, and brain assessment by magnetic resonance imaging, postoperatively through young adulthood. He has collaborated on pediatric cardiology follow-up studies with the International Cardiac Collaborative on Neurodevelopment (ICCON) and currently with the Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Outcome Collaborative (CNOC). Dr. Wypij has also worked on many other studies with investigators from the Departments of Adolescent Medicine, Cardiology, Cardiac Surgery, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Radiology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

He has also served as the Principal Investigator of the Data Coordinating Center for some of the largest multicenter randomized clinical trials in the field of pediatric critical care, including Randomized Evaluation of Sedation Titration for Respiratory Failure (RESTORE), Heart and Lung Failure – Pediatric Insulin Titration (HALF-PINT), and Safe Pediatric Euglycemia after Cardiac Surgery (SPECS). He currently directs the Data Coordinating Center for two international multicenter randomized clinical trials. The Prone and Oscillation Pediatric Clinical Trial (PROSpect) is comparing prone vs. supine positioning and conventional mechanical ventilation vs. high frequency oscillation ventilation in children with acute respiratory distress syndrome using a 2x2 factorial design with adaptive randomization. Stress Hydrocortisone In Pediatric Septic Shock (SHIPSS) is examining the potential benefits and risks of adjunctive hydrocortisone prescribed for children with fluid and vasoactive-inotropic refractory septic shock in a placebo-controlled blinded trial. He has also collaborated with the Severe Malaria in African Children clinical research network, involving investigators from the United States, Africa, and Europe.

Dr. Wypij previously oversaw Ph.D. and Master’s programs in Biostatistics at Harvard for many years, including admissions and recruitment, funding, student advising, orientation, and related student administration activities. He is an award-winning teacher and has taught courses in categorical data analysis, clinical trials, longitudinal data analysis, regression methods, statistical inference, and survival analysis at Harvard Biostatistics. Dr. Wypij has also taught short courses in biostatistics, clinical research methods, clinical trials, and regression methods in both lecture and webinar formats in Brazil, China, Gabon, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, at Boston Children’s Hospital, and for global training programs at Harvard Medical School.