Onyebuchi Arah, a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, is being honored with the 2016 Causality in Statistics Education Award.
The annual award, established in 2013 by Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and statistics, recognizes the work of an individual or team that enhances the teaching and learning of causal inference in introductory statistics coursework. Professor Arvid Sjölander of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm is also a recipient of this year’s award, which will be presented this July in Chicago at the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings, which are the largest gathering of statisticians and data scientists in the world. With funding from Microsoft Research and Google, the award carries a $5,000 cash prize for each of this year’s winners.
Arah is being honored for his graduate-level course, “Logic, Causation, and Probability,” which embraces current developments in causal inference using non-experimental data and equips students with both theory and practical tools.The 10-week course features an introduction to principles of deductive logic; allows for substantial practice in identifying and estimating target quantities using directed acyclic graphs, probability logic and potential outcomes language; and employs as a teaching tool “hands-on” data analysis exercises.
“While the study and practice of statistics is growing in popularity and demand in both academia and professional occupations,” said Pearl, who is co-chair of the prize-selection committee, “there remains a glaring gap when it comes to causal inference. Even with the recent development of causal inference tools, which are currently sweeping new insights and application areas, most statistics educators and textbooks do not convey any material on these tools.
“In giving this award, we not only recognize the dynamic efforts of renowned scholars, but also show other researchers and scientists that teaching causal inference can be fun and formative.”
Read the complete announcement here.
