Gehan, Edmund A.

Edmund A. Gehan, Ph.D., was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. He attended Manhattan College where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. Gehan was awarded his Doctorate in Applied Statistics from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He taught Applied Statistics from 1955 to 1957. He worked for the National Institute of Health (NIH) in 1958 and was the head of the Biometrics Section of the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center in 1959. He was a member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Gehan’s work in Biostatistics brought him to Houston as a professor at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in 1967; the institution was a member of the Southwest Oncology Group at that time. Prior to his appointment at M. D. Anderson, he collaborated with Drs. Emil Frei III and Emil J. Freireich cancer research. Gehan has coauthored numerous articles that influenced the development of cancer research with the use of data analysis in clinical trials. Two of which include the 1965 Biometika journal article “A Generalized Wilcoxon test for Comparing Arbitrarily Singly-Censored Samples” and the 1974 New England Medical Journal article “Non-randomized Controls in Cancer Clinical Trials.

Since 1994, Gehan is a Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics at Georgetown University Medical Center.

From the guide to the Edmund Gehan oral history, OH-GehanE-20030328., March 28, 2003, (Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center)