Skip to main content

Jesse Berlin, ScD

Adjunct Faculty

Dr. Berlin received his doctorate in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1988. After spending 15 years as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, under the direction of Dr. Brian Strom, Jesse left Penn to join Janssen Research & Development, as a Senior Director in Biostatistics. After 2 years, he was promoted to Vice President for Epidemiology. He served for 15 years as Vice President of Epidemiology across all of Johnson & Johnson, with responsibility for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer products. He retired from J&J at the end of August 2021. He has authored or coauthored over 280 peer-reviewed publications in a wide variety of clinical and methodological areas, including papers on the study of meta-analytic methods as applied to both randomized trials and epidemiology. He served on an Institute of Medicine Committee that developed recommendations for the use of systematic reviews in clinical effectiveness research and served for two years as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee to IMEDS (Innovation in Medical Evidence Development and Surveillance), part of the Reagan-Udall Foundation. Dr. Berlin served as an editorial team member of working group X for CIOMS (The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences), which has published guidelines for meta-analysis of drug safety data in the regulatory context. He was elected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2004. In 2013, Dr. Berlin received the Lagakos Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He currently chairs the Methodology Subcommittee for NEST (National Evaluation System for Health Technology, a public-private effort to develop research capabilities to study medical devices. He also serves as one of two Statistical Editors for JAMA Network Open.