James Robins

James M. Robins is an epidemiologist and biostatistician best known for advancing methods for drawing causal inferences from complex observational studies and randomized trials, particularly those in which the treatment varies with time. He is the 2013 recipient of the Nathan Mantel Award for lifetime achievement in statistics and epidemiology.

He graduated in medicine from Washington University in 1976. He is currently Mitchell L. and Robin LaFoley Dong Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. He has published over 100 papers in academic journals and is an ISI highly cited researcher.

Robins attended Harvard College with the class of 1971, concentrating in mathematics and philosophy. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, but did not graduate. He went on to attend Washington University School of Medicine, and practiced Occupational Medicine for several years. While working in occupational medicine, he attended basic courses in applied medical statistics at the Yale School of Public Health, but quickly came to the conclusion that the methodology used at the time was insufficiently rigorous to support causal conclusions.

In 1986, Robins published the paper "A New Approach to Causal Inference in Mortality Studies", which introduced a new framework for drawing causal inference from observational data. In this paper and in other articles published around the same time, Robins showed that in non-experimental data, exposure is almost always time-dependent, and that standard methods such as regression are therefore almost always biased. This framework is mathematically very closely related to Judea Pearl's graphical framework Non-Parametric Structural Equations Models, which Pearl developed independently around the same time.

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