A Conversation With Amy Racine-Poon

Abstract

Professor Dr. Amy Racine-Poon is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions as an applied Bayesian statistician in the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare. She was born in Hong Kong and obtained a BA with upper honors in Mathematics (1970) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She earned a PhD in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Erich L. Lehmann. She worked as a Lecturer at the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley (1975–1977) and as a Statistician at the Biometry Branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (1977–1980). Amy moved to Basel, Switzerland, in 1981 to join Ciba-Geiby/Novartis AG, where she worked for 42 years (1981–2023) across different therapeutic areas and stages of drug development, applying her skills in advanced statistical and pharmacometric methodologies that led to the development of large number of new drugs. During her career, she was also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London (1995–1997) and a Volunteer Statistical Expert at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington (2015–2019). Amy Racine-Poon's numerous honors include the Royal Statistical Society Greenfield Industrial Medal for Innovative Use of Statistics in the Industries (1995), Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1997), Novartis Distinguished Scientist Award (1999), American Statistical Association Youden Interlaboratory Research Award (2020) and the Sheiner-Beal Pharmacometrics Award (2024) from the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. The following conversation took place between Oleksandr Sverdlov (Alex) and Amy Racine-Poon (Amy) in October 2024.