"There are very few Zoroastrian students at Harvard — maybe two or three at a time. But there is a great deal of interest in the religion. I am frequently invited to speak about the religion and have delivered the morning prayers at the Appleton Chapel in Harvard Yard (where morning prayers are held daily since the founding of the University in 1636) on three occasions,” notes Dr Cyrus Mehta, professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1998. He is also the founding president of the Cytel Software Corporation which sports a proud reputation of providing outstanding software tools that solve important statistical problems in the fields of biomedical, epidemiological and behavioral science research, notes the website of the Corporation.
The Zoroastrian representative at the Harvard United Ministry, a multifaith organization representing the various Christian denominations, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Humanism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, Mehta, who classifies himself as a liberal, is the founder of the Harvard Zoroastrian Association whose major activity is the Gatha Study Group. He describes it as "a very small group of committed Zoroastrians who meet once a month at the Boston Vedanta Society.”
Mehta: general safety data
"Vibrant” is how he views the Zoroastrian community in North America, adding, "One has only to pick up a current issue of the FEZANA Journal to marvel at the variety of activities that our talented community is involved in and the success they are having. My hope is that we will keep up our traditions of truthfulness and charity that have been our most respected characteristics in India... The community will thrive and be a positive influence on American culture.”
With a Bachelors degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mehta proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whence he got his Masters and thereafter his PhD in operations research. After four years of teaching statistics at the University of Pittsburgh, Mehta says he accepted a post doctoral fellowship at Harvard University as a biostatistician working on cancer clinical trials and doing research on statistical computing, rising steadily to be assistant professor, associate professor and finally professor of biostatistics since 1998. "Meanwhile my research in statistical computing was turning out to be very important for analyzing efficacy and safety data for pharmaceutical companies. So, together with my long time research collaborator, Dr Nitin Patel, I founded Cytel Software Corporation as a vehicle for converting our research into commercial software. We have since grown into a 40 person company (20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and 20 in Poona) and offer all types of software and services for design, interim monitoring and analysis of clinical trials,” Mehta retraces the long road to success.
The Cytel combination of statistics, computer science and operations research is said to have revolutionized general statistics practice. When Cytel’s first products, StatXact and LogXact were released in the early 1990s, "statisticians in the biological, social and behavioral sciences working with small, sparse or unbalanced datasets were thereby freed forever from reliance on large sample approximations which were wholly unjustified by the data in question. Thanks to these pioneering packages, exact methods are now a standard component of the data analyses in regulatory submissions to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), in articles submitted to biomedical, epidemiological and behavioral science journals, and in legal or public policy decision making,” notes the Cytel website. Other products have followed, notably East, a commercial software package on which most major manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, biologics and medical devices rely as it enables them to take an early decision on when to stop clinical trials, ethically and economically. Installed world wide at numerous universities, pharmaceutical corporations, medical research centers and government agencies, the software has been reviewed favorably by the Royal Statistical Society as well as the American Statistical Association (ASA). In 1998 the firm received an award from the Massachusetts Technology Development Council for outstanding technology development funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program, notes the website.
From left: Cyrus, Mira and Satu Mehta
Mehta has published over 65 papers in such professional journals as that of the ASA, Biometrika and Biometrics. In 1987 Mehta and his co-authors Patel and Dr Karim Hirji received the George W. Snedecor Award from the ASA. In 1995 Mehta was elected a Fellow of the ASA and in 2000 he was named the Mosteller Statistician of the Year by the Massachusetts Chapter of the ASA. He conducts numerous short courses and workshops at pharmaceutical companies, universities and government agencies both in the US and overseas.
Born to Rustam Mehta, a lawyer by profession, and his wife Roshan (née Nanavati), Cyrus and his sister Vera lost their mother when he was but five years old. Some years later Rustam married respected surgical gynecologist Dogdo Bamji. Though both Rustam and Dogdo are no longer living, "I want to acknowledge my debt to my birth mother as well as to my step-mother. She was a loving person who took care of her step-children exactly like they were her own,” Mehta writes in an e-mail response to Parsiana’s queries.
Mehta’s Finland born wife Satu who specializes in early childhood education with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master’s degree from Wheelcock College helps children with learning difficulties, speech or other related problems. Their son Arun, 25, an MIT graduate, has joined a high-tech start up company in Boston that develops technology for tracking motion with application to sports equipment. Their daughter Mira, 20, is into her second year at Brown University, a member of its rowing team and was the coxswain of the varsity boat that won the National Collegiate Athletic Association Championship for 2004.
An active member of the Boston Vedanta Society along with Satu, the couple studies Vedic scriptures, the Bhagvad Gita and the teachings of Swami Vivekananda as well as the Gathas. Hence philosophy is Mehta’s intellectual bedrock. He contributes to the website www.vohuman.org, and presented a remarkably simple interpretation of the "fundamental theological puzzle often posed in one form or another: How could a benevolent, all wise, all merciful Creator permit the existence of evil?” Drawing upon Zarathushtra’s Yasna 30.3 which speaks of the creation of the "Spirits twain...one’s good, the other bad” at one of his morning addresses at Harvard, Mehta explained, logically, "Zarathushtra refers to the two choices as twins. This is important. It implies that they emerge together and that it is impossible to conceive of one without the other. The moment we become aware of good, that very moment we also become aware of evil. Can one conceive of strength except in relation to weakness? Can one conceive of life except in relation to death?”