Dr. Smith is an epidemiologist who focuses on developing and applying methods for causal inference in public health research. Dr. Smith approaches her applied research using a target trial framework, through which she has helped to clarify questions about exposures during pregnancy and to improve understanding of the effects of COVID-19 on birth outcomes. Her work in prostate and breast cancer addresses questions about complex treatment strategies over time. Her previous work on sensitivity analysis extended the E-value framework to quantify possible effects of selection bias, alone and jointly with other biases. She has also contributed to the literature on mediation, including sensitivity analysis for unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding. Currently she is researching methods to assess sensitivity to missing data under various assumptions.
The {targets} package is a workflow tool for R that allows you to split your data tasks into pieces and only re-run the necessary ones when you change the data, model, or a parameter. In this presentation, we will introduce the package and demonstrate how it can be used to manage the pipeline of R projects both big and small. We’ll work through a simple example and show how it can be extended through the use of branching. You are welcome to bring your laptop to follow along or just sit back and listen.