Casual Inference

In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Len Testa, president of TouringPlans, about solving optimization problems in travel and healthcare.

📦 Lucy's R package with touringplans data

Len's slide on model choices:

Follow along on Twitter:

• Len: @LenTesta
• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Ashley Buchanan about causal inference with a focus on networks. Dr. Buchanan is an assistant professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Rhode Island.

🔗 Dr. Buchanan's website

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan do a series recap and then discuss sensitivity, specificity, and appropriate messaging in the context of coronavirus rapid tests.

📝 Evaluation of the Abbott BinaxNOW rapid antigen test for SARS-CoV-2 infection in children: Implications for screening in a school setting

📝 NY Times article: One in 5,000

🐦 Kareem Carr's tweet about omitted variable bias in randomized controlled trials

📝 Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?

🦠 A calculator that lets you estimate COVID risk [microcovid]

In the (Local) News

📰 Will Podcasting and Social Media Replace Journals and Traditional Science Communication? No, but...

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

In this 23rd episode of Casual Inference Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about fixed vs random effect, complete a statistics challenge, and talk about DAGs.

🐦 Tweet from @jtc475 about fixed vs random effects terminology

🎲 This is Statistics March Randomness Challenge

📝 Lucy, Kyra, and Ellie's paper "Quantifying Uncertainty in Infectious Disease Mechanistic Models"

PeDAGogy

Here are the two Bridgerton DAGs we discussed.

1. Tweet submitted by @IGMoore: 

2. Tweet submitted by @AlenaSorensen

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Julia Raifman about health policy, a recent study on unemployment insurance and food insecurity, and anti racism in academia. Dr. Raifman is an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management at Boston University. Her research focuses on how health and social policies drive population health and health disparities.

📝 Geoffrey Rose's paper Sick Individuals and Sick Populations

📝Julia's recent paper - Association Between Receipt of Unemployment Insurance and Food Insecurity Among People Who Lost Employment During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

PeDAGogy

Come up with a Bridgerton DAG and share it with us on Twitter! Here is one for inspiration.  

Me: "Hi please fund me to do innovative research"

Also me: "Sure I'll lead a DAG discussion on the @PWGTennant et al. @IJEeditorial paper... I'd like to focus on how offensively hot the guy from Bridgerton is."@mrc_ieu and @BristolTARG PhD student Mark Gibson made my day! pic.twitter.com/CFOoYhMGjt

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Julia: @JuliaRaifman
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Ralph D'Agostino Sr. and Ralph D'Agostino Jr. about their careers in statistics, looking back at how things have developed and forward at where they see the world of statistics and epidemiology going. We're excited to kick off the 100th year of the American Journal of Epidemiology with this episode.

Ralph D'Agostino Sr. is a professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology at Boston University. He has been the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study, a biostatistical consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, an editor of Statistics in Medicine and lead editor of their Tutorials, and a member and consultant on FDA committees. His major fields of research are clinical trials, prognostic models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research. 

Ralph D'Agostino Jr. is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University where he is the Director of the Biostatistics Core of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methodologically his research includes developing statistical techniques for evaluating data from observational settings, handling missing data in applied problems, and developing predictive functions to identify prospectively patients at elevated risk for future negative outcomes. Some of his recent work includes the development of methods using propensity score models to identify safety signals in large retrospective databases. 

It also turns out they are Lucy's father and grandfather, so we have 3 generations of statisticians on the pod!

We also have Amit Sasson on to discuss the winning cookie from the #EpiCookieChallenge as well as her work in causal inference!

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

In honor of the Society for Epidemiologic Research 2020 Meeting, the hosts of four epidemiology podcasts came together to record the first ever "crossover event" to talk about their experiences recording our shows and what podcasting can bring to the table for the field of epidemiology. Join the hosts of Epidemiology Counts (Bryan James), SERiousEPi (Matt Fox, Hailey Banack), Casual Inference (Lucy D'Agostino McGowan), and Shiny Epi People (Lisa Bodnar) as they engage in a fun and informative (we hope!) conversation of the burgeoning field of epidemiology podcasting, emceed by Geetika Kalloo.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about ecological studies, the new Pfizer vaccine interim analysis, and more!

📈 Vanderbilt University Department of Health Policy's COVID-19 Deaths in Tennessee and Adoption of Mask Requirements (h/t Peter Rebeiro) 

📈 The original masks v no masks graph

🗞 Pfizer's press release about the interim analysis for their vaccine trial

📓 Pfizer's vaccine trial protocol

PeDAGogy

Here is the DAG from our peDAGogy segment:

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about communicating uncertainty, how air pollution policy is determined, and whether causal inference is a fad with Dr. Roger Peng from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats
• Roger: @rdpeng

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan talk about the causal questions linked to schools opening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they have Dr. Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, on to discuss her thoughts on and contributions to this area.

📄 Emily's Atlantic Piece Schools aren't super-spreader events

📊 COVID-19 School Response Dashboard

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Emily: @profemilyoster
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.