Janet D. Elashoff

Known fornQuery AdvisorScientific careerInstitutionsStanford UniversityThesis Optimal Choice of Rater Teams  (1966) FatherWilfrid Dixon

Janet D. Elashoff is a retired American statistician, formerly the director of biostatistics for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center^[1] and professor of biomathematics at UCLA.

Janet Dixon was the daughter of mathematician and statistician Wilfrid Dixon.^[2] She completed her Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard University in 1966; her dissertation was Optimal Choice of Rater Teams.^[1][3]

She became a faculty member in the Department of Education and Statistics at Stanford University. ^[4] With educational psychologist Richard E. Snow, she co-authored Pygmalion Reconsidered: A Case Study in Statistical Inference (C. A. Jones Publishing, 1971), a book on how teacher expectations affect student learning.^[5] She served on the Analysis Advisory Committee of the National Assessment of Educational Progress beginning in the mid-1970s, and chaired the committee in 1982.^[6]

While at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai, she wrote the program nQuery Advisor, widely used to estimate the sample size requirements for pharmaceutical testing, and spun off the company Statistical Solutions LLC to commercialize it.^[7]

She has been a Fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1978,^[8] following in the steps of her father who was also a Fellow of the ASA.