Kay Dickersin

Kay Dickersin was born on 10 November 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Richard and Barbara Dickersin, and was known in her family as Taddy. She graduated from Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts.

She began her undergraduate studies at Bennington College in Vermont, planning to major in art, but a field work term in a Harvard research laboratory drew her to science. She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked in Daniel Mazia's laboratory and earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1974 and a Master of Arts in zoology (cell biology) in 1975.

She then taught biology at West Valley College and Fullerton College in California and did developmental biology research at Dartmouth College. Through her students she discovered epidemiology, and in 1979 she enrolled at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where Curtis L. Meinert was her adviser. She completed her PhD in 1989 with a dissertation on publication and the meta-analysis of clinical trials.

After her doctorate Dickersin joined the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, working first in ophthalmology and then in epidemiology and preventive medicine. In 1998 she moved to Brown University School of Medicine, where she founded the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence-Based Healthcare. In 2005 she returned to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to direct its Center for Clinical Trials, later renamed the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis, and she led it until she retired as professor emerita in 2018.

Her research documented the existence of publication bias in medicine and later showed how selective outcome reporting distorts the evidence from clinical trials. She led the data coordinating centre for the Ischemic Optic Neuropathy Decompression Trial and helped push for clinical trial registration, co-chairing the scientific advisory group of the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform from 2005 to 2008.

She was a founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993 and sat on its steering committee until 1996. She opened the Baltimore Cochrane Center, the first in the United States, in 1994, directed the US Cochrane Center, and led the US Satellite of the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group from 2002 to 2018. She co-authored the 2011 Institute of Medicine report Finding What Works in Health Care: Standards for Systematic Reviews, and served as president of the Society for Clinical Trials and of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.

In 1986 Dickersin was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. With Marsha Oakley she started the support group Arm-in-Arm, and in 1991 she was a founding mother of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. As the only scientist on its board she organised science teach-ins for advocates, which grew into Project LEAD, the coalition's flagship training programme. In 2003 she started the coalition later named Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare.

She was married for 53 years to Robert Van Wesep, and they had two sons, Isaac and Ed, and four grandchildren. Her family recalled her love of cooking, sewing, the visual arts, literature and skiing, and her passion for social justice.

Dickersin died on 1 November 2026 in Exeter, New Hampshire, aged 74. Her family's obituary in the Baltimore Sun gave the cause as complications of progressive supranuclear palsy.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a tribute by Shruti Mehta, chair of epidemiology, on 9 November 2026. She was survived by her husband, her sons, four grandchildren, her mother Barbara and four siblings. No service was scheduled, and the family said a memorial would be held at a later date.

Dickersin's work changed how researchers and doctors judge medical evidence. The registration of clinical trials before they begin, which she championed, became standard practice and spread well beyond medicine, and the Cochrane community she helped build continues to produce systematic reviews used around the world.

Her honours included election to the Institute of Medicine in 2007, the Ingram Olkin Award for Lifetime Achievement in Research Synthesis Methods in 2014 and Cochrane's Anne Anderson Award. Former students described her as a meticulous, generous mentor and a steadfast champion of women in science.