Causal data science: personalizing treatment decisions in cancer
Leah Comment
Director, Decision Sciences
Foundation Medicine
Leah Comment is an epidemiologist and statistical scientist on a lifelong quest to conquer confounding. Her varied interests include causal inference for observational data, methods for analyzing time-to-event outcomes, and formal models of decision making under uncertainty.
After graduating with a PhD in biostatistics from Harvard, Leah joined Foundation Medicine, a precision oncology company. Most recently, she led the modeling team at F2IL, a joint data science incubator spanning Flatiron Health and Foundation Medicine. There, her team explored causal machine learning methods for comparative effectiveness analyses in real-world data. Despite the ever-present threat of confounding, she remains optimistic about the role of data science in democratizing evidence-based medicine to improve human health.