Emma Davies Smith
Research Scientist
Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Departments
Department of Biostatistics
Related Links
Biography
Emma Davies Smith is a Research Scientist at Harvard’s Center for Biostatistics in AIDS Research (CBAR), where she serves as Lead Statistician and co-PI of the Data Coordinating Center for the REPRIEVE trial and Senior Statistician for the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials (IMPAACT) Network. Within REPRIEVE, she defines scientific priorities and leads projects applying complex methods to answer important questions for people with HIV. Within IMPAACT, she is Lead Statistician for the IMPAACT 2016 trial comparing group therapy versus group discussion for psychological distress in youth with HIV. She is also the Statistical Representative for the Brain & Mental Health Scientific Committee and the Implementation Science Core, where she provides guidance to investigators developing new studies. She also leads the Risk-Benefit Statistical Working Group, which aims to develop patient-centric statistical methods to address real gaps encountered in IMPAACT studies.
As a PhD-level scientist with extensive training in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, she collaborates closely with clinical investigators to shape the future of HIV research and care. She designs rigorous studies to elicit causality when randomization is feasible, and leverages novel causal methods to generate real world evidence when it’s not. She measures impact by her methodological contributions to Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and her applied contributions to HIV care. Her methodology efforts focus on clustered designs and patient-reported outcomes, integral to implementation science and the quantification of risk-benefit trade-offs. She has published 2 first-author methods papers in Clinical Trials and Statistical Methods in Medical Research, and two second-author methods papers in Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics and Contemporary Clinical Trials. She also maintain a public blog statisticelle.com, providing tutorials on advanced statistical methods.
Her work is driven by a commitment to clinically meaningful inference: developing and applying statistical methods that inform risk-benefit trade-offs faced by people with HIV and their care providers. Her applied statistical projects have been cited by US Health and Human Services antiretroviral therapy guidelines and she is a two-time recipient of the CROI New Investigator Scholarship.
Education and Training
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M.Sc., Applied Statistics
University of Guelph -
Ph.D., Biostatistics
University of Western Ontario
Awards and Honors
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CROI New Investigator Award, 2026
Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) -
CROI New Investigator Award, 2025
Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections