Corwin Zigler

Credit: Vivian Abagiu

Corwin Zigler is Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, also appointed in Women’s Health at the Dell Medical School. Interviewed by Larissa Herold.

What brought you to UT Austin from the Harvard School of Public Health?

UT is at a very exciting time when it comes to joining statistics, data science, quantitative research and the health sciences. It’s a strong university, and the opportunity of the new Dell Medical School is unique. 

One of your research projects looks at how changes in air pollution regulations impact people’s health. How do the statistical methods you’ve developed shed light on questions like this?

I’m interested in causal inference. This means measuring and drawing a conclusion about the downstream causal interaction when some action is taken, whether it’s treatment by a doctor, a policy or a public health intervention. And when we do something, can we track the effects of the action? In the real world, effects can be difficult to track and isolate. For example, we can’t do an experiment where we give some people more air pollution and others less to see how their health outcomes differ. So causal inference in a nutshell is a way to re-create experimental conditions out of the hand we’ve been dealt in observational data.

What are some of the challenges you face when looking at health and environment data collected through observations rather than experiments? 

One of the big challenges is called interference. The idea here is that people don’t exist in isolation; they’re connected in some way. For example, we might be connected by a social network or by breathing air from the same power plant. Those types of interconnections make the statistics much more complicated. A lot of biostatistics evolved in the context of a medical clinical trial, but when we start to think about a public health intervention, a clinical trial doesn’t work any more because of the interferences from those connections. So a lot of my work is there in the impacts from the interconnectedness of people and environments. 

How does your area of research inform real-world outcomes? 

In an ideal world, we produce some amount of evidence as scientists and then that evidence is used to form a policy decision. In Dell Med, that would mean we come up with a method and then somebody high up in the health care system orients patient care to incorporate it into practice on a large scale. There are higher-level policies and practices that, if we can get them right, can have a lot of impact.

Find an extended version of this interview at txsci.net/zigler

“A lot of my work is there in the impacts from the interconnectedness of people and environments.”