ASISA, a leader healthcare company in Spain, established the Fundación ASISA Fellowship to promote excellent research on the effectiveness and safety of health interventions. The specific purpose of the Fellowship is to support the career development of early investigators, with an emphasis in training on the application of causal inference and artificial intelligence methods to clinical research.
ASISA Fellows are eligible for one or two years of salary support as postdoctoral research fellows in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Fellows are selected among applicants to postdoctoral positions affiliated with the CAUSALab in consultation with the Director of the CAUSALab and the Chair of the Deparment of Epidemiology. Priority is given to candidates who plan to apply causal inference and AI methodology in large healthcare databases to improve patient care.
Under the guidance of their faculty mentors, ASISA Fellows work in projects that range from the development of new methodology to the application of cutting-edge causal inference methods to studies of comparative effectiveness and safety. Some examples of former ASISA Fellows’ work are the use of Medicare insurance claims to evaluate the effectiveness of colonoscopy for colorectal cancer screening and of mammograms for breast cancer screening, the extension of the target trial framework to case-control studies, the development of new approaches to handle competing events, the use of electronic health records to confirm the absence of an effect of statins on cancer risk… ASISA Fellows have published highly cited papers in JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Nature Medicine, Epidemiology, American Journal of Epidemiology, International Journal of Epidemiology, and other leading journals.
The current ASISA Fellow is Gonzalo Martínez-Alés. Past ASISA Fellows were Gabriel Sanfélix (2011–2012), Xabier García-De-Albéniz (2012-2014), Justin Bohn (2014-2017), Barbra Dickerman (2017-2019), Mats Stensrud (2019-2020), and Geetha Iyer (2020-2021).