Lee Kennedy-Shaffer, PhD

Lee Kennedy-Shaffer is an Assistant Professor (Educator-Scholar Track) in Biostatistics. Lee received his PhD in Biostatistics under Dr. Michael Hughes in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and conducted epidemiologic research there with Drs. Marc Lipsitch and Michael Mina in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He was an Assistant Professor in the Vassar College Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2020–2024.

His research focuses on randomized and observational study designs and methods for the analysis of infectious disease interventions. This includes mathematical modeling, cluster-randomized trials, and quasi-experimental designs, all with an eye toward broader population health impacts than are usually addressed by individually randomized trials. He has worked on COVID-19 data collection and analysis as well, in particular accounting for the timing and correlation of infections in interpreting test results. This work has been published in journals such as Science, Statistics in Medicine, Clinical Trials, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others. In addition, he has written on the history of statistics, FDA policy, statistics education, and causal inference in baseball.