Dr VanderWeele is the director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University which among other things investigates the role that religious communities play in public health, medicine, and in bringing about human flourishing. These projects include original empirical research on how religious communities affect health, happiness, meaning and purpose, and close social relationships.

The Human Flourishing Program at large is an academic program located within the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University the mission of which is to conduct research that brings new knowledge and understanding to the academic community and the public on questions related to how we flourish as human beings.

Besides being Director of the Human Flourishing Program,Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D., is Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, as well as Co-Director of the Harvard Chan School’s Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance and applied economics, and biostatistics. His research concerns methodology for distinguishing between association and causation in observational studies, and the use of statistical and counterfactual ideas to formalize and advance epidemiologic theory and methods. His empirical research spans psychiatric, perinatal, and social epidemiology; the science of happiness and flourishing; and the study of religion and health. He is the recipient of the Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. He has published over two hundred and fifty papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is author of the book Explanation in Causal Inference, published by Oxford University Press.