Instructor       Constantine E. Frangakis
Meeting time      Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00-4:30pm
Office hours       Fridays 1:00-2:00pm, Hygiene E3037
Email: cfrangak@jhsph.edu

About this course:    An important task in public health and medicine is to evaluate and compare treatments, programs, and therapies.  To make accurate evaluations, it is important to study (and respect) data on people, that is, which treatments  we take and what outcomes we eventually have. For ethical reasons and practical reasons, however, studies with people cannot (and should not) be as experimental as in physical sciences, so that people who take one treatment can generally be different prognostically from those who take another treatment. Causal inference means the designs and methods we can use to take the outcome differences we observe between different treatment groups and correctly translate them to  effects of treatments.  This course presents recent developments in designs and methods to better evaluate treatment effects.

SCHEDULE       (Summaries of the lectures will be posted at each class)