Audrey Renson, MPH, PhD

My research is focused on effects of interventions on social determinants of health, and advancing quantitative methods for causal inference with these applications in mind.

A large portion of my work focuses on Beyond Bridges, a large initiative to link community-based social services to healthcare to address social determinants of health within the NYU Langone Health system in Brooklyn, NY. With Beyond Bridges, I work with the evaluation team to lead research studies evaluating the impact of multiple Community Health Worker-based programs.

I also study methods for learning about causal effects from observational data. I am especially interested in advancing methods based on difference-in-differences, a popular method for estimating causal effects from longitudinal data in the social sciences and public health. Specifically, my work has extended difference-in-differences to allow for time-dependent confounding, use of machine learning to relax model specification assumptions, and transporting inferences from one population to another. Currently, my colleagues and I are actively researching the role that causal diagrams can play in difference-in-differences analysis, and approaches to allow for spillover effects. I have also contributed to methods for rigorous descriptive epidemiology, such as appropriate use of survival analysis for this purpose.

Most of my methodological work is targeted at applications studying the effects of large-scale social programs and policies. For example, my methodological work has been applied to the effects of COVID-19 era policies, minimum wage, and federal smoke-free housing legislation. My colleagues and I are also actively developing several applications at the intersection of housing and health, including impacts of landlord-tenant laws and federal housing assistance policy on the overdose crisis.