The UC Berkeley Causal Lab (aka Casual Causal) at UC Berkeley works on causal inference problems motivated by a wide range of applications, including clinical trials, epidemiology, public policy, and many others. This includes research on theory and methods for causal inference such as robust statistics, semiparametric theory, and randomization inference, as well as domain-specific applied work. Our faculty and students, primarily based in the Statistics Department, also maintain strong connections with other departments such as EECS, Biostatistics, Political Science, and Public Policy.
Group Meeting
Applied Stats + Causal Inference Seminar Series, Fall 2026.
We meet Wednesdays, 2:00–3:30pm in Gateway 3355. Talks are informal and everyone is welcome, including students who are new to causal inference. The room is card-access, so if you are coming from outside the department, email Abdullah Ateyeh or Abhroneel Ghosh ahead of time and we will let you in. Berkeley students can also enroll as Stat 298 — IND 001 (class #13997).
Upcoming Talks
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Sept 2
— Laura Balzer (UC Berkeley)
Far From MCAR & Its Consequences in Global Health
- Sept 23 — Lihua Lei (Stanford)
- Sept 30 — Melody Huang (Yale)
- Oct 28 — Yaroslav Mukhin (Cornell, Economics)
- Nov 4 — Eli Ben-Michael (CMU)
- Dec 2 — Erin Hartman (UC Berkeley)
People
Faculty
Postdocs
Recent Papers
Automatically generated from arXiv.
- Aug 15, 2026
- Aug 04, 2026
- Jul 30, 2026
- Jul 21, 2026
- Jul 21, 2026
News
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August 07, 2026
Peng Ding’s paper with Zhichao Jiang, “Principled analysis of crossover designs: causal effects, efficient estimation, and robust inference,” was accepted to Annals of Statistics.
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March 02, 2026
Peng Ding’s joint paper with Pengfei Tian and Fan Yang titled “Stratified Permutational Berry-Esseen Bounds and Their Applications to Statistics”, was accepted by Bernoulli.
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February 20, 2026
Sam Pimentel is hiring a postdoc to work on causal inference methodology for impacts of mental health. Full details and application instructions here.
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February 03, 2026
Peng Ding’s joint paper with Yiqing Xu from Stanford and Anqi Zhao from Duke, “Factorial difference-in-differences”, was accepted by Journal of the American Statistical Association.
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January 21, 2026
Weihan Zhang’s joint paper with Zijun Gao from USC Marshall, “Estimation and Inference for Causal Explainability”, is available on ArXiv, and received acceptance ratings for the Fifth Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CleaR).
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January 20, 2026
Sam Pimentel received a three-year grant from the Huo Family Foundation to study the impact of social media use on adolescent mental health.
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December 05, 2025
Avi Feller, David Bruns-Smith, and Zhongming Xie’s paper, “Ridge Boosting is Both Efficient and Robust” was featured as a Spotlight Paper at NeurIPS.
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September 01, 2025
Sam Pimentel was promoted to Associate Professor!