About the book
Epidemiology is recognized as the science of public health, evidence-based medicine, and comparative effectiveness research. Causal inference is the theoretical foundation underlying all of the above. No introduction to epidemiology is complete without extensive discussion of causal inference; what's missing is a textbook that takes such an approach.
Epidemiology By Design: A Causal Approach to the Health Sciences takes a causal approach to the foundations of traditional introductory epidemiology. Through an organizing principle of study designs, it teaches epidemiology through modern causal inference approaches, including potential outcomes, counterfactuals, and causal identification conditions.
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About the author
Dr. Daniel Westreich is a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in epidemiology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008, and B.S. in computer science from Yale University in 1998.
Substantively, his research investigates the intersection of HIV with reproductive health. This work has elucidated relationships between pregnancy and response to antiretroviral therapy and clarified methodology for studying the potential impact of hormonal contraception on acquisition of HIV. He is currently a PI of the STAR Cohort of reproductive-age HIV-positive and -negative women, and a co-investigator on the MACS-WIHS Combined Cohort Study. He also studies issues related to COVID-19, and the intersection of HIV and chronic disease.
Methodologically, Dr. Westreich’s research focuses on methods in causal inference, and epidemiologic methods for implementation science. In 2014 he was awarded an NIH DP2 New Innovator award for the development of such methods. He is the author of the textbook Epidemiology By Design: A Causal Approach to the Health Sciences, an associate editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology, and sits on the editorial board of the journal Epidemiology.
His CV can be found here.