Cong Cao

I’m a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health and CSP Coordinating Center (CSPCC), VA Connecticut Healthcare System

I develop mechanism-informed causal AI methods to improve health. My research combines causal inference, statistical machine learning, and multimodal biomedical data to understand why patients respond differently to the same treatment. I develop statistical methods to identify disease mechanisms and estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. My long-term goal is to build reliable, interpretable AI methods that support better clinical decision-making.

Before Yale, I was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (2023–2025). I earned my Ph.D. in Economics, with a specialization in machine learning, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2023. I serve as an Associate Editor for Biometrics and the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health.