Casual Inference

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.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan casually discuss linear versus logistic regression, prediction versus inference, generalized linear models, and more!

📄Robin Gomila's paper: "Logistic or linear? Estimating causal effects on experimental treatments on binary outcomes using regression analysis"

🐦 Robin's twitter thread about the paper

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 discuss methodological advancement in causal inference with Dr. Elizabeth Ogburn from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

📄 Wang & Blei's The Blessings of Multiple Causes paper

🦠 COVID-19 Collaboration Platform

📈 COVID-19 Meta-dashboard of dashboards

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan are live for Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) week!

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 discuss community engagement, health disparities, and measure development with Dr. Melody Goodman from New York University Global School of Public Health.

🐦 Jonathan Jackson's tweet on the importance of measures of dispersion

📄 Goodman's paper Reaching Consensus on Principles of Stakeholder Engagement in Research

📄 Goodman's paper Content validation of a quantitative stakeholder engagement measure

📄 Goodman's paper on Community Research Training Fellows Program Training Community Members in Public Health Research: Development and Implementation of a Community Participatory Research Pilot Project

📄 The Relationship between In-Person Voting, Consolidated Polling Locations, and Absentee Voting on Covid-19: Evidence from the Wisconsin Primary discussed in the peDAGogy segment

Harm reduction tips for protests

Harm reduction tips for faith-based communities

General harm reduction tips

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about coronavirus, the evidence we have about masks, and designing observational studies.

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 discuss Bayesian statistics, model validation, and more, with special guest Dr. Frank Harrell from the Department of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University.

🤷‍♀️What does it mean to be Bayesian?

🤷‍♀️How can we decide if our models are good?

📈Frank's COVID trial resource hub 

📈Betsy Ogburn's COVID trial protocol hub

👨‍🏫Frank's Free Biostatistics in Biomedical Research Course

🐍Lucy's tweetorial on Type 1 error and including nonlinear terms in models

Follow along on Twitter:

• The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
• Ellie: @EpiEllie
• Lucy: @LucyStats
• Frank: @f2harrell

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss coronavirus a bit more, focusing on mask wearing, data quality, disease modeling, and more!

📈 IHME COVID-19 projections
😷 A quick DIY cloth mask how-to
😷 Ellie's TikTok on safe mask removal
🧪 Lucy's tweetorial on estimating prevalences from testing data
🤷‍♀️ Lucy's model uncertainty tweetorial 

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 discuss coronavirus with an added segment discussing current recommendations for people taking ACE inhibitors or ARBS with Andrew South from Wake Forest School of Medicine.

👏Wash your hands to Splash Mountain Medley:

🌟 Ellie's hand washing song lyrics (to be sung twice)

Twinkle twinkle little SARS
How I wonder where you are
Are you on my hands right now?
On my face or on my brow?
Twinkle twinkle little SARS
How I wonder where you are

💃 Ellie on TikTok

🔗 Nephrology Journal Club information about ACEi/ARBS and coronavirus

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Sean Taylor from Lyft.

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📝 Sean's Science paper

📦 Prophet R package

📝 Book on time-varying exposures

📝 Lyft engineering blog

📝 Hormone replacement therapy overview

📝 Analyzing observational HRT data by emulating a trial

📰 Local news

• AJE Methods Corner 

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Whitney Robinson from the Departments of Epidemiology at University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📝 Jeffrey Rose article (reprint)

📝 Chandra Ford's public health praxis paper

📝 Whitney's paper with Tyler VanderWeele on race as a cause

📝 Miguel Hernan's paper on well-defined interventions: Does water kill?

📝 NIH funding paper

📻 Acadames podcast

📝 Miguel Hernan's AJE paper on selection bias without colliders

📰 Local news

• We talk about novel Coronavirus and how you can get answers to your questions
• 📝We also chat about the infectious disease listserv ProMed Mail
• 📝 And the BlueDot "artificial epidemiologist". 

PeDAGogy:

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Elizabeth Stuart from the Departments of Mental Health, Biostatistics, and Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📝 Kern et al paper on Assessing Methods for Generalizing Experimental Impact Estimates to Target Populations

📝 Article by Sherri Rose on Liz Stuart (baby pics!)

🌐 Liz Stuart's website

📰 Local news

• Naomi Distelkamp won our #EpiCookieChallenge!
• Naomi plotted flu rates in the US
• We discussed Alberto Cairo's book How Chart's Lie

Follow along on Twitter:

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

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist studying at the University of Wollongong and a science communication writer for the Guardian, Observer, and more!

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📝 Gideon's post on relative versus absolute risk

🐦 Gideon's twitter account @justsaysrisks

🎙 Everything Hertz Podcast

🎙Gideon's Sensationalist Science Podcast

✍️ Gideon on Medium

📧 Email Gideon for advice on getting started in Sci Comm: gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com

👩‍🏫 PeDAGogy

• We discussed a paper recently published in BMJ on the association between arts engagement and mortality 
• Andrew Heiss tweeted a DAG with a proposed relationship between opera and longevity

• Robert Platt also tweeted about this, suggesting that there may be an explanation other than confounding

📰 Global news

• The New York Times wrote an article on the BMJ paper that we discussed in peDAGogy
• Here is some info on the BMJ Christmas Issue
• Lucy and Jeff Leek's clickbait-y Ted-ed lesson on clickbait

Follow along on Twitter:

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

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Matt Fox from the Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health at Boston University.

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📄 Paper discussing a null association between smoking during pregnancy and breast cancer risk
📚 Matt's textbook on quantitative bias analysis
🔗 Bias analysis website: sites.google.com/site/biasanalysis/

📰 Global news

• Wang and Blei's The Blessing of Multiple Causes
• Obgurn, Shpitser, and Tchetgen Tchetgen's Comment
• D'Amour's Comment

In this week's global news segment we mentioned M-bias. Here is an example DAG of this phenomenon:

Follow along on Twitter:

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

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Sherri Rose from the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📄 Paper by Anna Zink and Sherri Rose: Fair Regression for Health Care Spending
📄 The Blessing of Multiple Causes
📄  Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations
📚 Sherri's books on targeted learning
🔗 Sherri's website: drsherrirose.org
🔗 Data for Black lives: d4bl.org
👏 What we're is enjoying this week: baby Yoda
📰 Our local news: American Journal of Epidemiology article: a machine learning primer for epidemiologists

PeDAGogy segment:

In this weeks segment, Ellie describes a collider!

Follow along on Twitter:

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

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩‍🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Onyebuchi Arah from the Department of Epidemiology and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health about Social Epidemiology.

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:

📄 Study in Science Advances demonstrating the funding gap in research on the community level 

📄 Matt Fox's E-value study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology

👏 What Lucy is enjoying this week: Normcore tech newsletter

📰 Our local news: American Journal of Epidemiology article on obesity & neighborhoods 

Here is the DAG discussed in the peDAGogy segment:

Follow along on Twitter:

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

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

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan try to keep it casual in the first episode of the new Casual Inference podcast. Episode 1 features special guest Miguel Hernan from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Listen to learn how to improve your observational data analysis!

Follow along on Twitter:

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

Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.

Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode! 

Causal Inference, What If: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/

AJE article on applying the target trial method: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/188/8/1569/5486454

AJE tweetorial on that article: https://twitter.com/AmJEpi/status/1171866941906026496 

News report on the Economics Nobel Prize: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/economics-nobel-honors-trio-taking-experimental-approach-fighting-poverty

Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan try to keep it casual in this quick teaser to introduce you to the types of things the Casual Inference podcast will include. 

Follow along on Twitter:

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

Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.