Please join us for the L. Adrienne Cupples Award

For Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in Biostatistics

The 2024 Awardee:

Nandita Mitra, PhD

Professor of Biostatistics

Co-Director of the Center for Causal Inference

University of Pennsylvania

Thursday, April 4th, 2024

12:00 PM- Lecture & Award Presentation

Hiebert Lounge and Zoom

Register for In Person or Zoom

1:00 PM Lunch Reception

Title:   Death and Taxes: Assessing Certainty with Causal Inference

Abstract:  For causal evaluations to ultimately influence future policy decisions, statisticians must define relevant causal estimands and carefully consider underlying identification assumptions. In policy evaluations, this involves developing methodologies to address important data complexities, such as interference and treatment effect heterogeneity, to enable robust generalization and transportation of policy effects to diverse populations and counterfactual scenarios. In this talk, I will relate two recent experiences where careful application of core causal inference concepts proved invaluable. First, I will present my involvement in the evaluation of the Philadelphia excise tax on sweetened beverages where I will address the phenomenon of “spillover” and present robust estimators under relaxed identification assumptions. Second, I will relate my experience as an expert witness in a death penalty case.

I will describe the high-stakes challenge of making convincing arguments in a court of law about individual-level versus population-level causal effects, mediation, and unmeasured confounding when statements may impact future policies related to sentencing decisions.

Bio:  Nandita Mitra, PhD is Professor of Biostatistics and Co-Director of the Center for Causal Inference at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Mitra's primary research interests include the design and analysis of observational studies, causal inference, and statistical approaches for cost-effectiveness analysis. She has developed doubly robust approaches to estimation of cost-effectiveness measures, nonparametric influence function based instrumental variable estimators for censored outcomes, and difference-in-differences estimators for the evaluation of health policies under interference. She collaborates with investigators in oncology, health policy, and health economics and has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications. She serves as Chair of the Budget & Finance Committee of the International Biometrics Society, Chair of the American Statistical Association Statistics in Epidemiology Section, and Secretary of the Society for Causal Inference. She is Editor-in-Chief of Observational Studies, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and was recently awarded the ASA Mentorship Award.

Hybrid Event