Week 1

Purpose

Dr. Don Rubin visited the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington to engage in a roundtable discussion about causation to share with the 2022 Strengthening Causal Inference in Behavioral Obesity Research short course. This roundtable has been divided into separate topical subvideos, and distributed across all three modules.

Don Rubin

Donald B. Rubin is John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics, Harvard University, where he has been professor since 1983, and Department Chair for 13 of those years. He has been elected to be a Fellow/Member/Honorary Member of: the Woodrow Wilson Society, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Statistical Institute, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, European Association of Methodology, the British Academy, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

As of 2017, he has authored/coauthored over 400 publications (including ten books), has four joint patents, and for many years has been one of the most highly cited authors in the world, with currently over 200,000 citations and nearly 20,000 in 2016 alone (Google Scholar). He has received honorary doctorate degrees from Otto Friedrich University, Bamberg, Germany; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Universidad Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia; Uppsala University, Sweden; and Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Dr. Allison

David B. Allison, dean and Distinguished Professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington, is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies.

He received his Ph.D. from Hofstra University. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University and held a faculty position at the NIH-funded New York Obesity Research Center at Columbia University until 2001. After that, he spent 17 years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, serving as distinguished professor and director of the NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center.

douglas-landsittel

Dr. Landsittel earned his PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and has held numerous academic appointments and leadership positions there over the past 20 years. He has most recently served as a Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, Medicine, and Clinical and Translational Science in the School of Medicine, where he was Director of the Biomedical Statistics & Data Science Lab, Director of Biostatistics (for Research), Starzl Transplant Institute, and Director of the Expanding National Capacity in PCOR through Training & Collaboration (ENACT) Network.

Dr. Landsittel has a substantial background in occupational injury and exposures, biomarkers and prognostic models, and causal inference. Developing educational resources for patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), other causal inference methods, and other general educational resources in statistics, biomarkers, and epidemiology are among his research interests.

Dr. Owora

Dr. Owora is an assistant professor in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, Indiana University. Owora's background includes a Master of Public Health and a Ph.D. in biostatistics and epidemiology from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center—as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Children's Hospital Research Institute at the University of Manitoba.

Video Lecture

The video lecture is broken into seven parts: (1) Introductions, (2) The Rubin Causal Model, (3) Challenges in Obesity Research, (4) Treatment in Practice, (5) Design Trumps Analysis, (6) Causal Effects of Unassignable Factors, (7) Temporality and Control.

Please click each tab to watch each part of the video lecture.

Introductions
Rubin Causal Model
Challenges in Obesity Research
Treatment in Practice
Design Trumps Analysis
Causal Effects of Unassignable Factors
Temporality and control

Accessibility Note: To access auto closed captions (CC) services please click on the icon in the video's bottom right corner. Manual CC are available by submitting a request for services to ATAC: (812) 856-4112 or atac@iu.edu