New Faces

Laura BalzerLaura Balzer has recently joined our group as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She is working with Dr. Victor De Gruttola on the implementation and evaluation of HIV prevention strategies in the context of cluster randomized trials. Laura earned her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she worked with Drs. Mark van der Laan and Maya Petersen to design optimal studies and to develop maximally unbiased and efficient estimators for the causal effects with clustered data. The specific applications of this work include impact evaluation for HIV prevention and treatment strategies and understanding neighborhood determinants of health. 

Laura is also passionate about translating more advanced causal and statistical methods to applied audiences.  Prior to attending Berkeley, she earned a BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Vermont and her MPhil in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK. Laura is very excited to join the Harvard Biostat team!