Dr. Strobl joined our department July 1, 2024, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Strobl did his training in the Pitt MSTP and was among the most productive MD PhD students in the history of DBMI. Heauthored 14 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles when he was at Pitt.
Dr. Stroblperforms research in causal machine learning to detect new treatment targets for diseases from potentially non-experimental datasets. He was mentored by Shyam Visweswaran, MD PhD (Vice-Chair of Clinical Informatics for DBMI) and Gregory Cooper, MD PhD (Vice-Chair for Research for DBMI). There are very few individuals in the country with his training and aptitude for research in this important and rapidly growing area of study. Dr. Strobl completed his residency in Psychiatry and his fellowship in Child/Adolescent Psychiatry in summer 2024 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Eric will spend 80% of his time in research in causal inference and discovery research at DBMI and 20% clinical work in the Department of Psychiatry.
Research Interests: Eric plans to develop automated procedures that identify root causes of disease from data. A machine usually breaks down because of one or a few problems, like one rusty gear. Different copies of the machine also break down usually due to the same set of issues, like the same exposed gear. Analogously, diseases often result from a few root causes, and patients with complex disease often share the same root causes. Root causes also initiate acascade of causal events called pathogenesis that generates a constellation of clinical symptoms. Targeting root causes can thus mitigate all downstream pathology and clinical symptoms while minimizing polypharmacy.
Dr. Strobl’s work will help DBMI continue to build interdisciplinary research on campus, and act as a bridge to the Department of Psychiatry for AI/ML (particularly causal discovery) and add to DBMI’s central scientific strength, which Drs. Visweswaran and Cooper lead for UPSoM.
Dr. Strobl was recently featured in PittMed Magazine, Winder 2023/24 https://www.pittmed.pitt.edu/issues/winter-2024(Page 29 of Magazine)
Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=aimJiz4AAAAJ