The Role of Intuition in Epidemiology
Join us on Wednesday, October 28th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Matthew Fox.
Abstract: Intuition is a necessary part of everyday life, without which we could not make it through a day. Epidemiologists are taught to rely on science, reason, and facts in their work and yet, it is likely that we use intuition all the time. We use it when we make decisions about interpreting the results of studies, about the impact of sources of bias, in the decisions we make in our own research, in our teaching and in our communication with other scientists and the general public. Yet it isn’t clear when this approach is useful and when it causes harm. This talk will focus on the role of intuition in epidemiology with examples of cases where we rely on it too much and cases where we don’t use it enough.
Bio: Matthew Fox, DSc, MPH, is a Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health at Boston University. Dr. Fox joined Boston University in 1999. His research interests include treatment outcomes in HIV-treatment programs, infectious disease epidemiology (with specific interests in HIV and pneumonia), and epidemiologic methods. Dr. Fox works on ways to improve retention in HIV-care programs in South Africa from the time of testing HIV-positive through long-term treatment. As part of this work, he is involved in analyses to assess the impact of changes in South Africa’s National Treatment Guidelines for HIV. Dr. Fox also does research on quantitative bias analysis and co-authored a book on these methods, Applying Quantitative Bias Analysis to Epidemiologic Data. He is also the host of a public health journal club podcast called Free Associations designed to help people stay current in the public health literature and think critically about the quality of research studies and a podcast on Epidemiologic Methods called SERious Epi. He currently teaches a third-level epidemiologic methods class, Advanced Epidemiology as well as two other doctoral level epidemiologic methods courses.
Speaker Information
Matthew Fox, DSc, MPH
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