Dr Vanessa McNealis

  • Scott-Titterington Fellowship in Statistics & Data Analytics (Statistics)

email: Vanessa.McNealis@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns: She/her/hers

R422, Mathematics and Statistics Building, Glasgow, Scotland, G12 8TA

Import to contacts

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-3538-4916

Biography

I am a research fellow specialised in causal inference from complex observational data. I received my M.Sc. in Statistics from Université de Montréal in 2020 and my Ph.D. in Biostatistics from McGill University in 2024. 

My research involves developing causal inference methods in settings of dependence, including social network data, where we can expect treatments assigned to individuals to disseminate along the edges of the graph. Causal inference from observational social network data is rife with challenges, as these data are prone to unmeasured network confounding, interference, and contagion. More recently, I have been interested in the problem of disentangling effects due to influence and selection in the presence of homophily confounding, and performing causal inferences on dynamic networks. 

A closely related area of research is learning from data obtained from respondent-driven sampling (RDS), a chain-referral method for sampling members of hard-to-reach populations. With collaborators from the Engage study, I have also been studying ways to perform valid inference from RDS cohort studies leveraging weighting techniques from the survey sampling and causal inference literatures. As a statistician, I have also contributed to projects in cardiometabolic health in pediatric populations and plant science.

 

Research interests

  • Causal inference
  • Network interference
  • Social network analysis
  • Semi-parametric estimation
  • Robustness
  • Unmeasured confounding
  • Latent space models
  • Spatio-temporal modelling
  • Hierarchical modelling
  • Bayesian inference

Research groups

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Prior publications

Article

Soren Harnois-Leblanc et al. (2024) Role of Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviors on Vascular and Myocardial Structure and Function in Type 1 Diabetes Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 0022-3476 (doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2024.114196)

Deepinder Kaur Sohi et al. (2024) Early Lifestyle Determinants of Adiposity Trajectories from Childhood into Late Adolescence Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 2153-2176 (doi: 10.1089/chi.2023.0062)

Vanessa McNealis, Erica E. M. Moodie, Nema Dean (2024) Joint mixed-effects models for causal inference in clustered network-based observational studies Vanessa McNealis. (doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2404.07411)

Vanessa McNealis, Erica E. M. Moodie, Nema Dean (2024) Plasmode simulation for the evaluation of causal inference methods in homophilous social networks Vanessa McNealis. (doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2409.01316)

Vanessa McNealis, Christian Léger (2024) Smoothed pseudo-population bootstrap methods with applications to finite population quantiles Vanessa McNealis. (doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2410.07996)

Soren Harnois-Leblanc et al. (2023) Vascular and Myocardial Structure and Function in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes: The CARDEA Study Crossref. (doi: 10.1155/2023/8662038)

Jean-Baptiste Roberge, Soren Harnois-Leblanc, Vanessa McNealis, Andraea van Hulst, Tracie A. Barnett, Lisa Kakinami, Gilles Paradis, Mélanie Henderson (2021) Body Mass Index Z Score vs Weight-for-Length Z Score in Infancy and Cardiometabolic Outcomes at Age 8-10 Years Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 0022-3476 (doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2021.07.046)

Odile Carisse, Vanessa McNealis (2019) Development of Action Threshold to Manage Common Leaf Spot and Black Seed Disease of Strawberry Caused by Mycosphaerella fragariae Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 1943-7692 (doi: 10.1094/pdis-06-18-1107-re)

Odile Carisse, Vanessa McNealis, Alissa Kriss (2018) Association Between Weather Variables, Airborne Inoculum Concentration, and Raspberry Fruit Rot Caused by Botrytis cinerea Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 1943-7684 (doi: 10.1094/phyto-09-16-0350-r)

Odile Carisse, Vanessa McNealis (2018) Identification of Weather Conditions Associated with the Occurrence, Severity, and Incidence of Black Seed Disease of Strawberry Caused by Mycosphaerella fragariae Vanessa McNealis. ISSN 1943-7684 (doi: 10.1094/phyto-04-17-0136-r)

Supervision