Seminar Series: Dr. David Fisman

Making Fair Comparisons in the Epidemiology of Respiratory Infection

David Fisman

Professor
Division of Epidemiology
Dalla Lana School of Public Health
University of Toronto

Adjunct Professor
Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics
Western University

Short Biography:
Dr. David Fisman is a physician-epidemiologist focusing on applied epidemiology, mathematical modeling, and health economics. He completed clinical training at McGill, Brown, and Harvard, and earned an MPH from Harvard. A former AHRQ Health Policy fellow, he has held faculty appointments at McMaster, Princeton, and Drexel, and is currently Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Toronto. Author of over 270 articles, he is a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and remains an active clinician. He co-leads the Pandemic Readiness Stream at the University of Toronto's new Institute for Pandemics.

Abstract:
As the recent pandemic, and current concerns around measles and avian influenza, emphasize, respiratory infections are an important and dynamic source of population morbidity and mortality. As with any area in epidemiology, understanding the relationship between exposures and outcomes necessitates fair comparisons between exposed and unexposed individuals. In respiratory infection epidemiology, there are several important biases that may distort the relationships between exposures (e.g., infection, vaccination, health status) and outcome (e.g. infection, infection severity, death). Two such biases that have been of interest to me are ascertainment bias, which had a major distorting effect of our understanding of the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; and unmeasured confounding, which has served as a motivation for “randomized trial fundamentalism”, even when such trials are unethical or impractical. In this talk, I will present current work in progress on an approach adjust for testing ascertainment bias in respiratory infections, as well as efforts to validate this approach using a variety of external data sources. I will then speak briefly about the importance of instrumental variable approaches in epidemiology, their conceptual identity to randomization, and their relative ease of use as an alternative approach to randomized trials when such trials are impractical or unethical.

Area of Research:
Infectious disease epidemiology, mathematical modeling, health economics.

Learn more about Dr. Fisman:
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Date: Friday, March 28
Time: 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Location: PHFM 1150 (Western Centre for Public Health and Family Medicine) or Zoom (request link by email    epibio@uwo.ca)