Paolo Vineis

Researcher in residence at the Maison Suger in October 2026

Paolo Vineis is Chair of Environmental Epidemiology at Imperial College, London. His latest research activities focus on investigating biomarkers from omic platforms (including metabolomics and epigenetics) in large epidemiological studies. He has more than 1,200 publications (many as leading author) in journals such as Nature, Science, Lancet, Lancet Oncology. Fellow of Accademia dei Lincei (Italian National Academy of Sciences).

The project

Title: Causality in the interpretation of complex outputs of exposome research

"Causality has always had a practical goal beyond its philosophical appeal. In medicine causality is relevant to therapeutic and preventive choices. Typical questions are whether a drug cures a disease or a vaccine prevents infection. But causality is also involved in more complex questions at the border between biomedicine and social sciences, such as the role of social inequalities in health. The latter is a good example for several reasons: social position is an overarching, complex type of “exposure”, that exerts its influence on health through multiple pathways. The risk is that in biomedicine it is represented in a simplistic way, as it usually happens. In fact, for simple research questions such as the efficacy of drugs and vaccines the standard approach is the Randomized Controlled Trial, that has been conceived to address one cause-one effect relationships. The difficulties of disentangling the multiple connections between variables in observational science (particularly in biology, where everything is variable and dynamic) led to the centrality of such experimental approaches as the “gold standard”, an attitude that can be found e.g. in Miettinen’s [1] and Rothman’s [2] classical approaches to causality, i.e. a critical analysis of bias derived from the basic principles of randomization."