Jun 4, 2020
Jessica Young, PhD is a biostatistician in the Department of
Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School who joins the show to
discuss the ins and outs of her interesting and important work.
Tune in to learn the following:
Dr. Young’s job is two-fold: she works on both the applications
of statistical methods for
public health and clinical medicine, and also on the
development of methods in these areas. She focuses on causal
inference, which is the formal process of understanding how to
estimate causal effect from data collected in real-world
studies.
Through examples including a longitudinal study on nurses starting
in the 1970s to present day studies revolving around the
coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Young discusses confounding factors in
studies and the effect they have on interpretations of findings,
the importance of randomization, the presence of bias regardless of
how statistically significant a finding is, meta-analyses, where
she sees the field of biostatistics heading in the near future, and
more.
To learn about the basics of causal inference, Dr. Young recommends reading The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Visit https://www.populationmedicine.org/JYoung to learn more about her work and publications.