Research Notes

How do you model an outbreak when you don't yet know how the outbreak will unfold? In this episode of Research Notes, I speak with Lieutenant Commander Eric Mooring, an epidemiologist and data scientist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. We discuss the branching process model his team developed during the early...

What does it take to run a vaccine trial in the middle of an Ebola outbreak? In this episode of Research Notes, I talk with Dr. Ana Maria Henao-Restrepo, former WHO scientist and one of the leaders of the groundbreaking Ebola ring vaccination trial conducted during the 2014–2015 West Africa outbreak. The trial ultimately demonstrated that the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was highly effective and helped esta...

What happens when researchers stop a clinical trial early—not because something went wrong, but because the evidence became convincing faster than expected? In this episode of Research Notes, I talk with statistician David Macleod about a fascinating Bayesian adaptive trial embedded directly inside a mobile eye-screening program in Kenya. The project began with a practical global health problem: p...

In this episode of Research Notes, I talk with economist Dr. Grieve Chelwa about his paper using the synthetic control method to estimate the impact of cigarette excise taxes on smoking in South Africa. We start with a simple question: did higher taxes actually reduce cigarette consumption, or were other forces—economic change, cultural shifts, or declining trends already underway—doing the work?...

In this episode of Research Notes, I talk with Dr. Gabe Loewinger of the National Institute of Mental Health about a core challenge in psychedelic clinical trials: participants often know whether they received the treatment. This “functional unblinding” means that people in different trial arms can develop very different expectations about what the treatment will do, and those expectations may the...

In this episode of Research Notes, I talk with Dr. Rohan Khazanchi about his recent paper in JAMA Internal Medicine examining what happened when race was removed from equations used to estimate kidney function. For years, these equations overestimated kidney function for Black patients, delaying access to kidney transplant waitlists and reducing the likelihood of receiving a transplant. We discuss...

What does “clinically meaningful” actually mean in psychiatry? Compass Pathways recently reported Phase 3 results for COMP360, a synthetic psilocybin treatment for treatment-resistant depression. The company said 39% of treated patients achieved a “clinically meaningful” reduction in symptoms. But who decides what counts as meaningful? And how should we interpret a 3–4 point difference on a scale...

In this interview, I speak with Dr. Judith Lieber (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) about her recent paper in The Lancet Global Health examining episiotomy and postpartum haemorrhage in women with moderate or severe anaemia. I originally came across this paper while searching for a real-world example to teach directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). It turned out to be a perfect case: clin...