In Memoriam
James H. Ware
Jim Ware
1963 graduation
James H. Ware, the Frederick Mosteller Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Science at the Harvard Chan School, passed away on April 26, 2016 after a long battle with cancer.
Jim joined the faculty of the Harvard Chan School in 1979, after receiving his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University and spending eight years as mathematical statistician at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He was Dean for Academic Affairs at the School from 1990 to 2009, and as such he had a deep and significant effect on shaping the School’s academic and research vision.
After concluding his service as Dean, he returned to research and teaching. Jim was internationally recognized for his publications on the design and analysis of longitudinal and multi-level physiologic, clinical, and biological studies and on methodological issues in clinical trials research. He had a longstanding interest in studies of pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, and it is no exaggeration to say that his research efforts have helped save thousands, if not millions of lives.
Since 2008, he served as Director of the Biostatistics Program at the Harvard Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Jim had a great dedication to helping students, both undergraduates and graduate students – literally taking his work home with him between 1996-2003 when he and his wife Janice served as Masters of Cabot House at Harvard College. In addition to his wife Janice, Ware is survived by his daughter Cameron Ware and his son Jake Ware.
David Porter recalls: “Jim was our roommate for three years in Pierson. We became the 1400 Club in junior and senior years as seven of us (Jim, Mike Fowler, Koichi Itoh, Eric Souers, Eustace Theodore, Fong Wei, and myself) occupied that tangled suite of rooms above the gate in the north corner of the Pierson Quad next to Davenport. Jim unjustly considered himself an outsider as he did not share the prep school tradition and came to Yale from a Midwest rural background. But he was full of life and enthusiasm and in many ways the glue that held this diverse collection of ‘wombats’ together. After Yale, graduate school brought me to UW Seattle and Jim to Stanford. Once, in 1967, while he was ‘finding himself’ between his master’s and Ph.D. degrees, Jim showed up on the doorstep of the little house where Jean and I and our new baby girl were living. Jean remembers looking out the front window and seeing the baby carriage rolling down the street, followed at a short distance by Jim and myself running to catch up and having a good laugh on our way to the neighborhood park populated by an assorted miscellany of colorful occupants.”
Eustace Theodore remembers: “The Midwest was farther from New Haven in our day, a reality that made four years at Yale a challenge from time to time. Jimbo and I enjoyed a strong connection, for we shared a common background – public school kids from nowhere near. In recent years, after a powerhouse career on the faculty at Harvard, Jim reflected on the uncertainty felt during our time at Yale. Happily, he and I found the support we needed in our room, in the members of the 1400 Club – our name for the rabbit warren of rooms we occupied during our senior year. Over the years, from time to time we honored the friendships formed at Yale with reunions. Smoking our pipes, playing money hearts, delaying departure after supper for the library, purple punch, and planning for the arrival of girls on the weekend – all of that and more are woven into the tapestry of my memories of Jim. But at the center of it all is the image of his supportive smile when things got rough more than 50 years ago.”
Fong Wei writes: “Jim was what I always thought of as a classical Midwesterner, with an ingenuous naivete and sunny disposition which carried forward to the end. During his illness there seemed to be no end of optimism mixed with sober reality. Jim was clearly held in high regard as one can see in a symposium held in the honor of his retirement. It can be seen live streaming at the Harvard School of Public Health website and on YouTube. I and those who had the pleasure of knowing Jim and being his friend will miss him deeply.”