Donna Spiegelman, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health and professor of statistics and data science at Yale University, presented the 2026 Donna J. Brogan Lecture in Biostatistics on April 20 at Emory University.
Spiegelman holds a joint doctorate in both biostatistics and epidemiology. She is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science and leads the global oncology program at Yale Cancer Center. Her work focuses on methodological challenges in epidemiology, including causal inference, measurement error, study design, and implementation science. She has also developed innovative statistical approaches such as the Learn as You Go design aimed at improving the adaptability and success of multi-component clinical and public health trials. Prior to joining Yale, she served for nearly 30 years as professor and expert statistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Spiegelman’s lecture, titled “Causal Inference: The Limits of Confounding, the Boundlessness of Measurement Error,” examined two central sources of bias in epidemiologic research. She discussed how confounding bias, often considered a primary concern, is in fact tightly bounded and may have limited impact under many conditions. In contrast, she emphasized that measurement error—common in both observational and experimental studies—can introduce unbounded bias, particularly in settings with non-adherence or imperfect measurement. Drawing on examples from nutritional and environmental epidemiology, she illustrated the implications of these issues for study design, analysis, and interpretation.
This lecture honors Donna J. Brogan, professor emerita of biostatistics at Emory University and former chair of the Rollins School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics.
Leave a Reply