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Western Tennessee ASA Short Course: Hybrid Controlled Trials with External Controls | Shu Yang | Aug. 14

  • 1.  Western Tennessee ASA Short Course: Hybrid Controlled Trials with External Controls | Shu Yang | Aug. 14

    Posted an hour ago

    πŸ“ Title

    WTASA Short Course: Hybrid Controlled Trials with External Controls | Shu Yang | Aug. 14

    πŸŽ₯ Cannot attend live? All registrants will receive the course recording and slides/materials afterward.

    We are pleased to invite you to a WTASA short course featuring Professor Shu Yang of North Carolina State University.

    Speaker

    Professor Shu Yang, North Carolina State University

    Date

    Friday, August 14, 2026

    Time

    2:00–5:00 PM Central Time

    Format

    Online via Zoom

    πŸ” Topic

    Hybrid Controlled Trials with External Controls: A Bias-Aware Frequentist Toolkit for Design, Analysis, and Software

    πŸ’¬ A personal note from the organizer

    Professor Yang is one of the biostatistics scholars I have long admired for her ability to bridge methodological rigor and practical clinical-trial needs.

    In my work at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, pediatric oncology, rare diseases, limited sample sizes, and single-arm trials repeatedly raise difficult questions about how to construct credible comparisons. External controls can be highly valuable in these settings, but they also create serious concerns about covariate shift, outcome drift, hidden bias, and type I error inflation.

    Many of us encounter these challenges without having had an opportunity to organize the methods into a single practical framework. Professor Yang has specially reworked and integrated insights from her years of research for this course, combining theory, examples, a case study, open-source software, and interactive discussion. The course is tightly structured while remaining unusually comprehensive.

    🎯 Course objectives

    Β·   Explain what external controls and hybrid controlled trials are, and identify settings where they are most useful, including rare diseases, pediatric trials, and populations with substantial unmet need.

    Β·   Identify the two key sources of bias when borrowing external control data: covariate shift (selection bias) and outcome drift (hidden bias).

    Β·   Compare frequentist bias-aware borrowing methods, including test-then-pool, bias-function modeling, and semiparametric efficient estimation with selective borrowing.

    Β·   Apply randomization-based inference with conformal selective borrowing to control type I error, even in small trials.

    πŸ•’ Course timeline

    2:00–4:00 PM: Overview of frequentist methods

    Β·   01  Gold Standard's Limits

    Β·   02  Borrowing Data, Risk

    Β·   03  Statistician's Toolkit

    Β·   04  Small Trial Confidence

    Β·   05  A Smarter Clinical Trial

    4:00–5:00 PM: Case study, software demonstrations, and interactive learning

    πŸ’΅ Registration

    Registration fee: $20

    PayPal registration link:

    https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/ACGXXEE3R3JU6

    ______________________________________________

    The Zoom link will be shared with registered participants.

    We anticipate strong interest across the clinical trials, biostatistics, pediatric research, rare-disease, real-world evidence, and causal inference communities.

    We look forward to your participation!

    Organized by:

    Western Tennessee ASA Chapter (WTASA)

    WTASA Executive Committee:

    Haitao Pan (President)

    Yiwang Zhou (Vice President)

    Yuan Zhang (Treasurer)

    Kendrick Li (Secretary)

    Xueyuan Cao (Student Representative)

    Xichen Mou (Council of Chapters Representative)

    Best regards,

    Haitao Pan, PhD
    President, WTASA



    ------------------------------
    Haitao Pan
    Associate Professor
    St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
    ------------------------------


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