Congratulations Daniel Klippert!

Daniel Klippert was honored with the Bernd Streitberg Award 2025 for his master thesis "An Analysis of Causal Inference Methods for Competing Risks". The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Markus Pauly (RC Trust, TU Dortmund) and Prof. Dr. Sarah Friedrich-Welz (Mathematical Statistics and AI in Medicine, University of Augsburg). The Bernd Streitberg Award is awarded for excellent biometric theses by the German Region of the International Biometric Society.

In his thesis, he addressed the challenge of estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) from survival data with competing risks. In such settings, an individual is at risk of failure due to multiple competing events. For instance, in medical applications, this could mean distinguishing between different causes of death rather than considering only death overall. This allows for estimating the causal effects of treatments in preventing specific causes of death, rather than just their effect on overall survival. The primary contribution of his thesis is a simulation study that systematically evaluates the predictive performance of various meta-learners developed for CATE estimation in competing risks settings, with the objective of providing guidance for their practical application in real-world scenarios.