Jaffer Zaidi, PhD

Titles and Organizations

Assistant Professor, Global and Community Health

Contact Information

Email: jzaidi2@gmu.edu

Accepting PhD students for Fall 2025
Accepting MS, Global Health students for Fall 2025

Personal Websites

Biography

Dr. Jaffer Zaidi is an assistant professor in the Department of Global and Community Health. Zaidi’s research interests are primarily within causal inference, including but not limited to sufficient cause methods, sensitivity analysis, principal stratification, mediation analysis, and applications of such methods. Zaidi established the quantification of individual level principal stratum direct effects using randomization alone, and as a result was able to shed light on the low birth weight paradox. Before coming to Mason, Zaidi was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded through SAMSI (Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute), and has conducted research in Somkhele, South Africa at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI).

Research

Select Publications 

  • Zaidi, J. M., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2021). SUFFICIENT CAUSE INTERACTIONS FOR CATEGORICAL AND ORDINAL OUTCOMES. Statistica Sinica, 31, 2195-2212.

  • Zaidi, J. M., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2021). On the identification of individual level pleiotropic, pure direct, and principal stratum direct effects without cross world assumptions. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 48(3), 881-907.

  • Zaidi, J., Grapsa, E., Tanser, F., Newell, M. L., & Bärnighausen, T. (2013). Dramatic increases in HIV prevalence after scale-up of antiretroviral treatment: a longitudinal population-based HIV surveillance study in rural Kwazulu-Natal. AIDS (London, England), 27(14), 2301.

Awards

  • Young Investigators Award, ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, July 30, 2019

Affiliations

Degrees

  • PhD, Biostatistics, Harvard University
  • A.M., Biostatistics, Harvard University
  • MSc, Statistics, University of Warwick
  • BSc, Mathematics with Statistics for Finance, Imperial College London