Research Notes is a conversation series with the researchers behind each companion note for Global Health Research in Practice. Each episode pairs with a note on this site, so you can listen, watch, or read.
with LCDR Eric Mooring · U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Reproduce the CDC's 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak projections in your browser, then change the assumptions behind them. An interactive branching-process model that shows how modeling studies inform a public health response: every conclusion is conditional on a stated mechanism, and isolation coverage near 70% is where containment tips.
with Dr. Ana Maria Henao-Restrepo · World Health Organization (former)
Ervebo's efficacy was measured in humans through a ring-vaccination trial; Janssen's two-dose regimen was inferred from animal challenge via immunobridging. Follow how that distinction was made — and what each design choice cost in interpretability.
with Dr. David Macleod
How a research team embedded a Bayesian adaptive trial directly inside a mobile eye-screening app in Kenya, why it stopped after just four weeks, and what the design tradeoff between speed and certainty looks like in real-world implementation research.
with Dr. Grieve Chelwa
Separate three concepts being conflated in public discourse — synthetic participants, the synthetic control method, and AI-augmented inference — using South Africa's tobacco tax policy as a worked example of how synthetic control builds counterfactuals from real data.
with Dr. Rohan Khazanchi
Use a recent study of the OPTN wait time modification policy to learn how interrupted time series designs evaluate policies implemented at a known point in time, with a comparison group, washout period, and real OPTN data.
with Dr. Gabe Loewinger · National Institute of Mental Health
Use Compass Pathways' psilocybin trials to explore how functional unblinding challenges the interpretation of psychedelic trial results, and what sensitivity analysis, interaction models, and design innovations can tell us about the boundary between pharmacology and expectancy.
with Dr. Jerry Rosenbaum · MGH Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics
Use Compass Pathways' Phase 3 psilocybin trials to examine how remission thresholds, response definitions, and the minimum clinically important difference shape the interpretation of trial results.
with Dr. Judith Lieber · London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Walk through a real research example to see how directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) help you identify confounders, select adjustment sets, and justify your analytical strategy.