Pierre Robillard Award 2022

Janie Coulombe
Pierre Robillard Award
2022
McGill University

Thesis Advisor: 

Dr. Erica E. M. Moodie and Dr. Susan M. Shortreed

Thesis Topic: 

Causal inference on the marginal effect of an exposure: Addressing biases due to covariate-driven monitoring times and confounders

The Pierre Robillard Award is awarded annually by the SSC to recognize the best Ph.D. thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university during the previous year. 
 

Janie Coulombe is currently a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, working in collaboration with Dr. Erica E. M. Moodie and Dr. Susan M. Shortreed on causal inference and missing data imputation. Prior to that, she earned a bachelor’s in Mathematics and a master’s in Statistics from the Université de Montréal. After obtaining her master’s degree, Janie worked for two years as an analyst at the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. There, she learned to work with complex, large datasets not meant for research purposes and discovered a passion for biostatistics and causal inference. She then went on to pursue doctoral studies at McGill University, under the supervision of Dr. Erica Moodie and Dr. Robert Platt, and earned in 2021 a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health. Her doctoral work focused on causal inference with imperfect longitudinal data. It proposed new estimators for the average treatment effect in settings where the observation times of an outcome of interest are covariate-dependent. It also assessed a few different extensions that can account for other complex data scenarios.
 

The citation for the award reads: 

“To Janie Coulombe from McGill University for the thesis entitled “Causal Inference on the Marginal Effect of an Exposure: Addressing Biases due to Covariate-Driven Monitoring Times and Confounders”

Written under the co-supervision of Professors Erica Moodie and Robert Platt.