History of the Conference

In June 2005 a small group from the Department of Statistics at Columbia University convened a “miniconference on causal inference” which consisted of “six talks and lots of discussion.”  On the original conference website, in addition to the six speakers, twelve participants are listed.  Since then the conference has grown into an annual tradition, attracting an audience more than four times bigger than the first; click here for the presentations from the 2008 conference at The Johns Hopkins University.  One effect of this growth has been a requisite change in the description of the conference’s locality from “Mid-Atlantic” to “Atlantic,” reflecting the ever expanding list of institutions that are represented this year, from as far west as Chicago, as far north as Michigan and Boston, and even as far east as London.  The 2009 Atlantic Causal Modeling Conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania aims to be the biggest and best ever, with two named lectures and time dedicated to young researchers.

The William Cochran Lecture honors the contributions made by William Cochran whose investigations of methods for causal inference with observational data laid foundation for methods that are practiced and continually being developed today, such as matching.  Professor Cochran was the third chair of what is now known as the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and spent the later part of his illustrious career at Harvard University

 

 

The Jerome Cornfield Lecture honors the contributions to the fields of biostatistics and public health by Jerome Cornfield whose work with case-control studies and estimating relative risk for rare diseases formed the basis for much of the modern era’s epidemiologic research.  Professor Cornfield was the fourth chair of what is now known as the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and, after Hopkins, had a long-standing and influential career at the National Cancer Institute.

About the Named Lectures