John Richard Pamplin II

Dr. Pamplin is the inaugural Bruce P. Dohrenwend Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Pamplin’s research seeks to highlight and intervene against rising risk and changing patterns in mental health and substance use by critically examining how structural factors, such as the enactment of laws, and the role of policing in enforcing those laws, may produce differential impacts across populations. This work is broadly comprised of three primary domains: (1) estimating the overall, and heterogeneous effectiveness of drug policy interventions for the overdose crisis; (2) identifying and developing interventions for modifiable population determinants of depression and suicide risk; and critically examining law enforcement practices as potential structural barriers to effective overdose and mental health crisis interventions. In service of these goals, Dr. Pamplin uses advanced statical and computational methods such as causal machine learning methods to identify heterogenous treatment effects of potential interventions.