James M. Robins is an

epidemiologist Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and risk factor, determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decision ...

and biostatistician best known for advancing methods for drawing

causal Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...

inference Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in ...

s from complex

observational studies In fields such as epidemiology, social sciences, psychology and statistics, an observational study draws inferences from a sample (statistics), sample to a statistical population, population where the dependent and independent variables, independ ...

and

randomized trial In science, randomized experiments are the experiments that allow the greatest reliability and validity of statistical estimates of treatment effects. Randomization-based inference is especially important in experimental design and in survey sampl ...

s, particularly those in which the treatment varies with time. He is the 2013 recipient of the Nathan Mantel Award for lifetime achievement in statistics and epidemiology, and a recipient of the 202
Rousseeuw Prize in Statistics
jointly with

Miguel Hernán Miguel Hernán is a Spanish–American epidemiologist. He is the Director of the CAUSALab, Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Member of the Faculty at the Harvard–MIT Pro ...

, Eric Tchetgen-Tchetgen,

Andrea Rotnitzky Andrea Gloria Rotnitzky is an Argentine biostatistician whose research involves causal inference on the effects of medical interventions in the face of missing data. She is Prentice Endowed Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Washingt ...

and Thomas Richardson. He graduated in

medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...

from

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

in 1976. He is currently Mitchell L. and Robin LaFoley Dong Professor of Epidemiology at

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first ...

. He has published over 100 papers in

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...

s and is an

ISI highly cited researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, ...

Biography

Robins attended

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

with the class of 1971, concentrating in mathematics and philosophy. He was elected to

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...

, but did not graduate. He went on to attend Washington University School of Medicine, graduating in 1976, and practiced

Occupational Medicine Occupational medicine, until 1960 called industrial medicine, is the branch of medicine which is concerned with the maintenance of health in the workplace, including prevention and treatment of diseases and injuries, with secondary objectives ...

for several years. While working in occupational medicine, he attended basic courses in applied medical statistics at the

Yale School of Public Health The Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) was founded in 1915 by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow and is one of the oldest public health masters programs in the United States. It is consistently rated among the best schools of public health in the co ...

, but quickly came to the conclusion that the methodology used at the time was insufficiently rigorous to support causal conclusions.

Research

In 1986, Robins introduced a new framework for drawing causal inference from observational data. In this and other articles published around the same time, Robins showed that in non-experimental data, exposure is almost always time-dependent, and that standard methods such as regression are therefore almost always biased. This framework is mathematically very closely related to

Judea Pearl Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on belief ...

's graphical framework Non-Parametric Structural Equations Models, which Pearl developed independently shortly thereafter. Pearl's graphical models are a more restricted version of this theory. In his original paper on causal inference, Robins described two new methods for controlling for confounding bias, which can be applied in the generalized setting of time-dependent exposures: The G-formula and G-Estimation of Structural Nested Models. Later, he introduced a third class of models,

Marginal Structural Models Marginal structural models are a class of statistical models used for causal inference in epidemiology. Such models handle the issue of time-dependent confounding in evaluation of the efficacy of interventions by inverse probability weighting for ...

, in which the parameters are estimated using inverse probability of treatment weights. He has also contributed significantly to the theory of dynamic treatment regimes, which are of high significance in

comparative effectiveness research Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the direct comparison of existing health care interventions to determine which work best for which patients and which pose the greatest benefits and harms. The core question of comparative effectiveness r ...

and personalized medicine. Together with

and other colleagues, in 1994 he introduced doubly robust estimators (derived from the influence functions) for statistical parameters in causal inference and missing data problems. The theory for doubly robust estimators has been highly influential in the field of ausal inferenceand has influenced practice in computer science, biostatistics, epidemiology, machine learning, social sciences, and statistics. In 2008, he also developed the theory of higher-order influence functions for statistical functional estimation with collaborators including Lingling Li, Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, and Aad van der Vaart.

Selected publications

* * * * * * * *

Notes

References

James Robins — Mitchell L. and Robin LaFoley Dong Professor of Epidemiology
Harvard School of Public Health (Accessed 15 March 2008).
Dr. James M. Robins — Bibliography
Harvard School of Public Health (Accessed 15 March 2008). * Gehrman, Elizabeth (March 23, 2006

''Harvard University Gazette''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Robins, James American epidemiologists American statisticians Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard School of Public Health faculty Living people Washington University School of Medicine alumni Biostatisticians Fellows of the American Statistical Association Harvard College alumni