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Eric V. Strobl, MD, PhD
- Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics
- Attending Physician, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
- Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, Child and Adolescent Outpatient Clinic
Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) | University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Biography
Dr. Eric V. Strobl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh and an attending physician in child and adolescent psychiatry. He earned both his MD and PhD in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, then completed residency training in psychiatry and fellowship training in child and adolescent psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Strobl’s research develops causal discovery and causal inference methods for treatment discovery in psychiatry and biomedicine, with applications to learning clinically meaningful outcomes from psychiatric data, identifying root causes of disease from high-dimensional biomedical datasets, and optimizing psychiatric treatment using real-world evidence.
Research Interests
Dr. Strobl’s research centers on developing computational methods for treatment discovery in psychiatry and biomedicine, with a strong emphasis on causal discovery and causal inference. His work spans three main areas: learning clinically meaningful outcomes from psychiatric data, identifying the root causes of disease from high-dimensional biomedical data (including electronic health records, gene expression, and single-cell RNA sequencing), and optimizing psychiatric treatment selection using observational evidence. He is also developing scalable algorithms for causal structure learning in the presence of cycles, latent variables, and selection bias.
Specialties
- Causal Discovery and Inference
- Translational Bioinformatics
- Computational Psychiatry
- Machine Learning in Medicine
- Psychiatric Treatment Optimization
Websites & Links
Education & Training
- B.A., Molecular & Cell Biology (Neurobiology); B.A., PsychologyUniversity of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA2005–2009
- M.S., Biomedical InformaticsUniversity of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
- Ph.D., Biomedical Informatics; M.D., MedicineUniversity of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA2011–2019
- Psychiatry ResidencyVanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN2019–2022
- Child and Adolescent Psychiatry FellowshipVanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN2022–2024
Certifications
- PsychiatryAmerican Board of Psychiatry and Neurology2023
- Certificate in Electroconvulsive TherapyVanderbilt University Medical Center2024
- Child and Adolescent PsychiatryAmerican Board of Psychiatry and Neurology2024
Awards & Distinctions
- Pitt Med Professionalism AccoladeUniversity of Pittsburgh School of Medicine2025
- Research AwardVanderbilt University Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry2024
- Best Paper AwardACM Bioinformatics and Computational Biology2021
- Hamilton Scholar AwardUniversity of Pittsburgh Medical Scientist Training Program2018
Representative Publications
Strobl EV, Gamazon ER. Transcriptome-wide root causal inference. PLOS Computational Biology. 2025;21(9):e1013461. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013461. PMID: 40893109.
Strobl EV. Consistent differential effects of bupropion and mirtazapine in major depression. Journal of Affective Disorders. 2025;388:119551. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2025.119551. PMID: 40449742.
Strobl EV. Predicting the Predictable in the Psychiatric High Risk. Proceedings of Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference. 2025;298:1–29.
Strobl EV, Zhang K, Visweswaran S. Approximate kernel-based conditional independence tests for fast non-parametric causal discovery. Journal of Causal Inference. 2019;7(1):20180017. DOI: 10.1515/jci-2018-0017.
Strobl EV. A constraint-based algorithm for causal discovery with cycles, latent variables and selection bias. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics. 2019;8(1):33–56. DOI: 10.1007/s41060-018-0158-2.
Research Grants
| Grant / Funding Agency | Role | Grant Number | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitt Biomedical Informatics Start-up University of Pittsburgh | PI | Start-up | 2024–2027 |
Trainees
| Trainee | Degree Program / Role & Years |
|---|---|
| Semmie Kim | PhD, Biomedical Informatics (Fall 2024–present) — Primary research advisor |
| Marco Barbero Mota | Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt (Fall 2022–present) — Monthly mentoring, root causal discovery |
| Hannah Luo | CoSBBI (Summer 2025) — Weekly mentoring, instrumental variable analyses |
| Samuel Blechman | M.S., Biomedical Informatics (Spring 2025) — Thesis committee |
| Brittany Gomez | PhD, Biomedical Informatics (Fall 2024–Spring 2025) — Weekly mentoring, causal discovery |