Congratulations to PhD student Eric Cohn who recently received a Young Investigator Award from the ASA’s Statistics in Epidemiology Section to present at JSM for his paper on Generalization and Individualization of Matched Samples.
Eric is a second-year PhD student, and he has been working with Dr. José Zubizarreta. Under Dr. Zubizarreta’s direction, Eric has explored and refined matching and weighting methods for causal inference in both randomized and non-randomized settings. These methods have applications for transporting causal effect from the original study population to particular subgroups, target populations, and target individuals of interest. In particular, Eric and Dr. Zubizarreta extended the method of cardinality matching through the new technique of self-matching, which finds the largest self-weighted sample that is balanced relative to flexible covariate profiles and has an unrestricted matching ratio. The profiles can correspond to target populations or specific individuals and do not necessarily require individual-level data (i.e., aggregate summaries can be used). Eric and Dr. Zubizarreta applied these techniques in an exploratory observational study of the relationship between opioid use, suicide, and mental health.
