Investigator, Asst Prof (M) Mongan Institute, Mass General Research Institute

Member of the Faculty of Medicine Harvard Medical School

cancer prevention; cardiovascular disease; causal inference; comparative effectiveness research; methods Dr. Joy Shi is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on applying causal inference methods in administrative health databases and other observational data to conduct target trial emulations which inform clinical and policy decision-making. This work has largely focused on evaluating screening strategies for colorectal cancer and prostate cancer using data from the Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) trial and electronic health record data from the Veterans Health Administration, respectively. 

Methodologically, her work focuses on addressing some of the limitations of instrumental variable methods, a statistical technique that can be used to estimate causal effects, even in the presence of unmeasured confounding. This includes (1) developing instrumental variable methods for time-varying treatments and outcomes (via g-estimation of structural models), and the application of these methods to Mendelian randomization (MR) studies; (2) evaluating and quantifying the impact of different study designs for Mendelian randomization; and (3) mitigating common sources of selection bias in Mendelian randomization studies.

Dr. Shi received her doctoral training in Population Health Sciences, and postdoctoral training in the CAUSALab and Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She also teach methods for causal inference at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.