The 2019 ARP Awards of Distinction & ACR Masters

DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR AWARD

The Distinguished Scholar Award is presented to Michael LaValley, PhD, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University School of Public Health, for his exceptional achievements in scholarly activities pertinent to arthritis and rheumatic diseases.

“Being a member of the ARP has been a big piece of my professional identity,” says Dr. LaValley. “This award recog­nizes my research role in rheumatology and also the con­tributions I’ve made to the ACR’s Arthritis Care & Research journal.” Dr. LaValley has had more than 150 papers published in his career.

After receiving his doctorate in statistics in 1993 from Penn State University, Philadelphia, Dr. LaValley completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 1995 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That same year, he joined the Boston University faculty in the Department of Biostatistics, where he has continued to work for the past 24 years.

During his career, he has collaborated extensively on research into different aspects of rheumatic disease, including osteoarthritis and amyloidosis, with researchers from Boston University’s Clinical Epidemiology Research and Training Unit, now called the Rheumatology/Arthritis & Autoimmune Diseases Research Center, and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work with many outstanding rheumatology researchers,” he says, pointing to former ARP member and Boston University researcher Saralynn Allaire, PhD. “We worked on randomized controlled trials that established the impact of vocational rehabilitation on work outcomes for people with arthritis.”

A major focus of his research has been on meta-analyses that critically evaluated treatments for rheumatic conditions and formulated new ways to assess osteoarthritis progression for clinical trials and longitudinal cohort studies. In this capacity, he also worked with researchers at Harvard University and Tufts University, Medford/Somerville, Mass., seeking effective treatments for osteoarthritis and other rheumatic diseases.

After joining the ARP in 1996, Dr. LaValley served on its Research Committee and Survey Task Force, and is now a member of the Annual Meeting Planning Committee. He has reviewed abstracts for the Annual Meeting and has been an associate editor of Arthritis Care & Research since 2011.

Despite decades of research, he says there’s one area he is still “chiseling away” at—accurately predicting the progression of arthritis in patients with early stage disease.

Meanwhile, working with ARP members has given him a broader view of rheumatology.

“Many of us work in one area, maybe within one disease, or conduct one type of study,” says Dr. LaValley. “[The] ARP has given me a much wider appreciation of all the different channels [and] what’s happening in the field, which has been very useful to me, professionally and personally.”