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Upcoming Events
October 23, 2025
11am-12pm CT / 12pm-1pm ET Zoom
Register Here
This presentation will describe the concept of a dose in behavioral and social interventions. We cover challenges in determining optimal dose in behavioral and social interventions with single and multicomponent interventions and in the context of heterogeneity. We provide an overview of approaches for testing doses and components including descriptive, inferential, and adaptive designs. Lastly, we will present a real-world dementia intervention and implications for research.
Presenters:
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- Heather Allore, PhD, has been at Yale since 2000. Her research is focused on issues related to the design and analysis of trials and studies of multifactorial geriatric health conditions, especially among persons with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementia. Several projects focus upon health disparities of older adults. She developed a sub-discipline of biostatistics that focuses on training and methodological development in geriatrics called “Gerontologic Biostatistics.” This discipline trains biostatisticians for conducting collaborative research with clinical investigators in geriatrics and gerontology and provides the basis for the development of new statistical methodologies. She has developed a website that aids those interested in aging research, including those familiar with analytic methods and those getting familiar with these methods.
- Guangyu Tong, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health. He directs the Cardiovascular Medicine Analytics Center (CMAC), which supports study design and analytics across Yale’s cardiovascular research community. His research spans cardiovascular medicine, pragmatic trial methodology, implementation science methods, Bayesian statistics, and causal inference, with contributions to NIH-funded trials and global health studies. Dr. Tong holds faculty affiliations with interdisciplinary initiatives in implementation science, Alzheimer’s disease, HIV prevention, and firearm injury prevention. He also serves as Statistical Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).
Recorded Webinars
Dr. Jeffrey Birk is an Assistant Professor of Medical Science at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an affective psychologist with a background in psychophysiology and emotion regulation. Dr. Birk’s research examines psychological factors and health behaviors in cardiovascular patient populations, including cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome. He has developed mechanism-focused interventions to reduce psychological distress in cardiac patients after acute medical events.
This presentation introduces a resource designed to guide researchers how to conduct rigorous mechanism-focused research in a step-by-step manner across multiple study designs. This tool was developed as part of the Science Of Behavior Change initiative. The webinar describes the rationale for mechanism-focused research and the importance of properly measuring the mechanisms that are believed to underlie the potential efficacy of interventions. It details how CLIMBR can inform the development, implementation, reporting, and evaluation of mechanism-focused research across a broad range of study designs.
Download webinar slides: Birk-EMBRACE-Webinar-2025.pdf
Dr. David L. Roth is a Professor Emeritus of Geriatric Medicine and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University. He was trained as a clinical psychologist and has considerable expertise as an applied statistician, with over 40 years of experience as an NIH-funded investigator. In addition to his collaborative contributions, Dr. Roth served as a Principal Investigator on multiple R01 grants that examined the health effects (and benefits) of family caregiving using data from large national epidemiological investigations. Although Dr. Roth retired from his full-time academic position in 2024, he continues to be an active scholar and serves as a consultant on multiple funded projects, including the EMBRACE Roybal Center. He has a long history of collaboration with EMBRACE Center leaders.
This presentation introduces investigators to key decisions that must be made when testing intervention mechanistic hypotheses with statistical mediation methods. Topics include whether change scores or post-treatment scores should be analyzed, how baseline (pre-treatment) measures should be used as covariates, the importance of selecting mediating variables with very high reliabilities, and the availability of multiple methods for testing the statistical significance of and interpreting the magnitude of the mediated effect.
Download webinar slides: Roth-EMBRACE-Webinar-2025.pdf
