Assistant professor of health care policy, Jose Zubizarreta, PhD, has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new statistical methods for causal inference in large datasets.

This grant will support a group of graduate students, and together the team will investigate formal and theoretical properties of these methods and use them to address varied questions in the health and social sciences.  They will work on instrumental variable methods, discontinuity designs, and randomized experiments.  Among others, Zubizarreta and his team will develop new methods that improve the statistical efficiency of randomized experiments and that enhance their generalizability.

In addition to writing academic articles on these topics, Zubizarreta will develop open source statistical software to make the methods amply available.  More information on Zubizarreta’s research can be found on his website.