Chandra Pettiford
Chandra Pettiford is a seasoned biostatistician and Chief Executive Officer of CP Analytics, where she leads advanced statistical consulting across clinical research, vaccine safety, and real-world evidence. She has been a biostatistician since 1998 and has worked in clinical research since 2002, bringing decades of experience to the design and analysis of complex clinical and observational studies. Her expertise spans safety signal evaluation, risk assessment, and regulatory-aligned statistical methodologies, supporting data-driven decisions across the product lifecycle, particularly for biologics and other innovative therapies.
Throughout her career, Chandra has held senior leadership roles in biostatistics, contributing to high-impact research and guiding multidisciplinary teams through rigorous study design and execution. In the past two and a half years, she has focused on statistical consulting through her own firm, where her day-to-day work involves analyzing data, solving complex problems, and developing statistical analysis plans that demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of investigational therapies. Her work plays a critical, behind-the-scenes role in bringing new treatments to market, ensuring that clinical evidence meets the standards required by regulatory agencies such as the FDA.
Chandra’s path into biostatistics was driven by a lifelong interest in mathematics and a desire to apply her skills in a meaningful way. While she considered other areas such as finance and sports, she ultimately chose to focus on health to make a direct impact on people’s lives. In addition to her clinical and statistical expertise, she has developed a specialized focus on healthcare data privacy, including HIPAA de-identification and re-identification risk assessment. She works with organizations to evaluate both structured and unstructured data including AI-generated outputs helping ensure compliance, protect patient privacy, and enable the responsible use of data in an evolving healthcare landscape.
• Honored Listee
Marquis Who's Who
• Kean University - BA, Mathematics
• Stevens Institute of Technology - MS, Applied Mathematics - Statistics
• Emory University - MPH, Biostatistcs
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
If they have a love of math and problem solving, this would be a great field for them to be in. It's pretty specialized, and because of the FDA requiring that people in clinical research have qualifications to do their jobs, it kind of opens up the opportunity for people who do love to do math and statistics and are good at problem solving. And then it's helpful to society, too. It's a way to be in the background - most people when I tell them about biostatistics, they have no idea what it is. But we've seen many commercials on TV about different drugs on the market, and it takes people like me to bring them to the market. The statistician is the one who actually makes the plan, the statistical plan for the analysis, and helps in proving that a drug is efficient, or effective, and is also safe.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Since COVID, the job market and employment opportunities are different. A lot of companies and people wanted to invest more in pharmaceuticals, so COVID actually opened that up. But also, they're more open for people working remotely too. Before COVID, a lot of times they wanted you to work on-site at the office. Those who want to work in the field now have opportunities to work from home more than before. They realized that people are even more efficient at working from home, because they probably work more hours than they should. People in our field don't have low ethics anyway - we had to go through multiple years of college and education, and we're pretty driven. A lot of times we'll end up working more hours than our 40 hours anyway. Sometimes you'll think about how to solve a problem or what's the best analysis for a certain study, so your brain is kind of moving a lot. The computer age has also helped - we have access to a lot more online research now. We can look up articles without always having to go to the library and print things out like when I was younger. If we can see if a methodology was used before, we can look them up, contact researchers, and print out their research articles. You just become more of an informed statistician now.