Member biographies

Professor Debbie Bradshaw (TAG Co-Chair)
Chief Specialist Scientist
South African Medical Research Council

Trained as a biostatistician, Professor Debbie Bradshaw moved into the field of epidemiology and specialised in the area of health metrics. She established the SAMRC Burden of Disease Research Unit in 2000, an intramural research unit that aims to monitor health status and determinants in South Africa. She has contributed to national health surveys and led the first National Burden of Disease Study for South Africa, followed by a Comparative Risk Assessment. She also led the team that developed a rapid mortality surveillance system that identified the impact of HIV on mortality in the 2000s. She has been committed to assisting government to improve the health information system and has made a vital contribution to strengthening vital registration and statistics in South Africa through ongoing collaboration with government and serving on advisory committees. She was an honorary professorial appointment in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town since 2015. She contributed to established a WHO Family of International Classification (WHO-FIC) collaborating centre based at the Medical Research Council and was a member of the Health Metrics Network Technical Advisory Group. She retired as Unit Director in 2019 but remains active in the Unit including developing new projects focused on monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Dr Kevin McCormack (TAG Co-Chair)
Head of Division
Sustainable Development Goals Indicators & Reports and Geographies
Irish Central Statistics Office

Dr Kevin McCormack is responsible for sourcing, developing and the dissemination of the national statistical data for the Irish UN SDG Indicators. In this role, he works closely with Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi), Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC) and Esri-Ireland. At the international level, he is UNECE’s Western European Delegate to the UN Inter Agency Expert Group on SDGs (IAEGSDG) and co-chairs the IAEG’s Working Group on Geospatial Information (WGGI). Kevin is also the statistical lead to the Irish National COVID-19 Data Hub which is built within a geographic information system (GIS), that facilitates the measurement, monitoring and visualisation of COVID-19 data in terms of mortality and infection rates by geographical regions. Kevin holds a BSc in Applied Sciences (Maths & Chemistry) from Trinity College Dublin, a MSc in Actuarial Science from University of Leicester and a PhD in Statistics from University College Cork.

 

Dr Oleg Chestnov (TAG Co-Chair)
Fellow
Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics of
Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation

Dr Oleg P. Chestnov has vast experience in public health governance and implementation of practical measures for monitoring, prevention, and control of diseases and premature mortality at both national and international levels. Over the past 30 years, Dr Chestnov worked at the forefront of public health response to some of most pressing global health issues, engaging in strategic health policy formulation at the highest political level (including UN declarations). Between 2012 and 2018, Dr Chestnov worked as Assistant Director- General for Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) and Mental Health at the World Health Organization (WHO). In that role, he led the WHO work on the establishment of a comprehensive Global Monitoring Framework for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) comprising 25 key measurable indicators which were (developed) and adopted by WHO Member States at the 66th World Health Assembly. In 2019, Dr Chestnov retired from active duty at WHO and returned to Russian Federation, where he is a fellow at a leading public health research center FRIHOI focusing on statistical research and development of disease monitoring models. He authored and co-authored over 100 publications including in some of the most renowned peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, British Medical Bulletin, Global Public Health, and other.

 

Dr Timothy Adair
Principle Research Fellow
Melbourne School of Population and Global Health

Dr Tim Adair is a demographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He works on the development and application of methods to generate reliable mortality statistics from civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems in low- and middle-income countries. His primary role is with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, where he trains and works closely with analysts from several low- and middle-income country governments (including China, Brazil and Myanmar) to assess the quality of CRVS data and measure key national and international mortality and cause of death indicators. Dr Adair also conducts research into the slowing, and often reversal, of the long-term decline in cardiovascular diseases in high-income countries.

 

 

Dr Jenny Garcia Arias
Research Analyst
Institut National d’Études Demographiques

Dr Jenny Garcia Arias is a specialist in mortality and causes of death analysis with imperfect statistics. She is currently part of the operational and editorial board in charge of “the Demography of COVID-19 deaths” database at the French National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED by its acronym in French). She has focused on the comparability of the COVID-19 statistics published by European and Latin American countries to identify reporting bias in the data according to the type of collection system. She has participated in the impact assessment of COVID-19 in CRVS business process and general data quality in the Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia regions. In addition, she has extensive research experience in estimating mortality in the context of crisis and incomplete data at the national and sub-national level.

 

 

Dr Simona Bignami
Associate Professor
Department of Demography
l’Université de Montréal

Simona Bignami is an Associate Professor in the Department of Demography at l’Université de Montréal. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, following a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. She is currently the director of the Research Groups on Aboriginal Demography and the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Studies in Population. She has almost two decades of experience in studying demographic indicators of population health, especially for infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Her areas of expertise also include aboriginal demography, family dynamics, and survey data collection and analysis. In her current work, she uses new tools to improve our understanding of households living arrangements and their evolution over time. Since COVID-19 started spreading across the globe, she has also been studying the demographics of the pandemic in Europe and North America, and she has been actively involved in knowledge-translation to policymakers and the general public.

 

 

Dr Carlo Giovanni Camarda
Research Scientist
Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques

Dr Carlo Giovanni Camarda is a chargé de recherche at INED (Institut National d’Études Démographiques) in France and head of the research unit “Mortality, Health, Epidemiology”. From 2007 to September 2012, he has been research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (Germany). He received his first university education at the Università “La Sapienza” in Rome (Italy) on Social and Demographic Statistical Sciences. Later he continued his study at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research within the Laboratory of Statistical Demography. He earned his Ph.D. in “Mathematical Engineering: Statistical Sciences and Techniques Area” at the Department of Statistics at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid with a dissertation on “Smoothing Methods for the Analysis of Mortality Development”. His interests range from mortality forecasting with smoothing techniques and by age-at-death distributions to general theory for the biodemography of human ageing to modeling patterns of digit preference, warping models for lifetime distributions, modelling and smoothing mortality surfaces and reconstruction of mortality series by causes of death. He also has numerous collaborations in European research institutions and he has been involved in various teaching activities. In the past years, he has written some research papers in the field of demography and statistics and he has devised an R package for smoothing and forecasting mortality.

 

Dr Carlos Castillo-Salgado
Professor of Epidemiology
John Hopkins University

Dr Castillo-Salgado leads a real-time group for the daily monitoring of the COvid-19 impact in 19 countries of Latin America with 80 epidemiologists. This group has been very valuable for the exchange of experiences, policies, protocols, adjustments needed for active and sentinel surveillance systems and the recommendations for the incorporation of containment/mitigation interventions. During the 20 years of working for the Pan American Health Organization, Dr Castillo- Salgado created the current database for the “Core Health Indicators” of the Organization, improving the mortality statistics of the Americas by increasing the mortality database from four hundred years-countries to three thousand years-counties of mortality data by cause.

 

 

Joseph Friedman
MD/PhD Candidate, UCLA

Joseph Friedman is interested in the measurement and alleviation of health disparities, with a particular focus on social determinants of health, reproductive justice, and HIV. Prior to starting at UCLA, he completed a combined MPH and research fellowship program at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. He worked on the Global Burden of Disease project, quantifying how improvements in social determinants lead to gains in health. He also worked on disease modeling projects exploring global HIV trends and how they can be improved with anti-retroviral therapy treatment programs. As part of his MPH, he worked in Mexico City, researching social and economic barriers to accessing legal abortion care. For his undergraduate studies, he attended the University of Vermont, studying medical anthropology and Spanish. He has worked on ethnographic and mixed methods projects in Mexico and Costa Rica, as well as medical development trips in Peru and Ecuador.

 

Dr Jacques B. O. Emina
Professor and Head of Department
Population and Development Studies
University of Kinshasa

Dr Jacques Emina is Professor at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and head of the Department of Population and Development Studies. He is also the Managing Director of Population and Health Research Institute (PHERI), a research institution based in Kinshasa, DRC. He completed his PhD in Social Sciences (Demography) from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) in March 2005. Jacques has an extensive experience in Monitoring and Evaluation, population and health policy’s analysis, sexual and reproductive health and the demography of marginalized and vulnerable population. Jacques has worked for several institutions at the national and international level. He has coordinated the Research and Evaluation component of the USAID funded research and evaluation project called Evidence for Development (E4D) in West Africa. He also worked as the Science Programme Manager for the Scientific Research Coordination Section at the INDEPTH Network’ Secretariat in Accra; Senior Research Bio-Statistician at the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust in Malawi; the WHO/TDR-PSI regional coordinator for the External Evaluation of the Impact of PSI’s intervention of Community Case Management of Childhood Illness on all causes Childhood Mortality in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi; and Researcher-Head of the Data Unit at African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Nairobi, Kenya.

 

Gu Youyang
Independent Data Analyst
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mr Youyang Gu is a data scientist and practical machine learning expert. He is the creator of covid19-projections.com, a widely-used site dedicated to accurate modeling of the COVID-19 pandemic. From April 2020 to October 2020, the site featured a prediction model which combined machine learning with a classic infectious disease SEIR model to make death forecasts for all 50 US states and more than 70 countries. This model was cited by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help inform public health decision making. Due to its reputation as the most accurate model during its time, covid19-projections.com has been widely featured by national and international media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, among others. From November 2020 and onwards, Youyang focused his efforts on estimating the number of true COVID-19 infections in all 50 states and 3,000+ counties in the US. Beginning in December 2020, covid19- projections.com also began tracking and modeling vaccine rollouts on its path to herd immunity. Prior to his COVID-19 modeling work, Youyang honed his research skills in a variety of fields: tech, trading/finance, and sports analytics. His expertise is in using machine learning to understand data, separate signal from the noise, and make accurate predictions. Youyang completed his Bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), double majoring in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Mathematics. He also received his Master’s degree at MIT, completing his thesis as part of the Natural Language Processing group at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

 

Dr Stéphane Helleringer
Professor of Social Research and Public Policy
New York University Abu Dhabi

Dr Stéphane Helleringer is a demographer with interests in a) the development of new methods to measure demographic trends in countries with limited data, and b) measuring the impact of epidemics on population health and mortality. He has conducted several trials of innovative approaches to collecting demographic data (e.g., computer vision). He has also worked extensively on the impact of HIV/AIDS, Polio, and Ebola in several African countries. Helleringer is currently the principal investigator of a multi-country study on adolescent and adult mortality in Malawi, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, and Bangladesh, funded by the US National Institutes of Health. He recently initiated a panel study of behaviors and mortality during the COVID–19 pandemic in Malawi.

 

 

Professor Prabhat Jha
Professor
University of Toronto

Professor Prabhat Jha is a University Professor at the University of Toronto, Endowed Professor in Global Health and Epidemiology and Canada Research Chair at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital. Professor Jha is the lead investigator of the Million Death Study in India, which quantifies the causes of premature mortality in over 3 million homes from 1998 to current. His publications on tobacco control have enabled a global treaty now signed by over 180 countries. He founded the Statistical Alliance for Vital Events, which focuses on reliable measurement of premature mortality worldwide. Earlier, Professor Jha served in senior roles at the World Health Organization and the World Bank. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012. Professor Jha holds an M.D. from the University of Manitoba and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

 

 

Dr Nazrul Islam
Research Fellow
University of Oxford

Nazrul Islam, MBBS, MSc, MPH, PhD is a Physician-Epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. Following his medical training as a general practitioner, he received graduate degrees in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia. He then moved to the University of Cambridge as a Quantitative Research Associate to work on randomised controlled trials and large observational studies on cardiometabolic disorders. His current work at the University of Oxford involves a combination of research methodology, medical statistics, and machine learning to examine cardiovascular disease burden using integrated electronic health records and large prospective health studies.

 

 

 

Dr Anand Krishnan
Professor of Community Medicine
All India Institute of Medical Sciences

Dr. Anand Krishnan is a Professor of Community Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India and chairs the Technical Support Group of the National Sample Registration System (SRS) based Verbal Autopsy system in India. He is a Member of the WHO Working Group on Influenza Burden Estimation and heads the WHO Collaborating Centre for Capacity Development and Research in Community based NCD Prevention and Control.

 

Professor Sarah Lewington
MRC Senior Investigator Scientist,
University of Oxford (Epidemiology, medical statistics)

Professor Sarah Lewington leads the CTSU’s Global Population Studies Group. Her main research interest is studying the major avoidable causes of premature adult mortality (particularly tobacco, alcohol, blood pressure and obesity) in low- and middle- income countries. The aim of the Global Population Studies Group is to support and build the local capacity required to conduct epidemiological studies in low-resourced settings. Such studies generate the reliable epidemiological evidence from diverse populations required to inform national and global health strategies for cost-effective control of non-communicable diseases. Over the past 20 years, the group has developed several international collaborations and is the Oxford-based lead for studies conducted in Russia, Cuba and India, involving 1.25 million participants.

 

 

Dr Li Liu
Associate Professor
John Hopkins University

Dr. Liu is a population health researcher interested in studying and improving survival among vulnerable populations. The majority of her research to date has focused on children and adolescents, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. She has been co-leading the WHO and Maternal and Child Epidemiology Estimation (WHO-MCEE) collaboration on child and adolescent causes of deaths since 2017 and have been a contributing member of the group’s work since 2009. Through this collaboration, Dr. Liu has worked extensively with child and adolescent cause of death data originated from vital and sample registration systems and verbal autopsy studies globally. She has also consistently led high profile publications in this area. Dr. Liu has also been working on improving civil registration and vital statistics systems through improving the measurement of neonatal mortality and birth registration. She is currently a member of the WHO Reference Group on Health Statistics (RGHS), Task Force #3, Causes of Deaths, and has been a frequent invited speaker at the TAG meetings of the United Nations’ Interagency Group on Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME).

 

 

Dr Xihong Lin
Professor of Biostatistics
Harvard University

Dr Xihong Lin is Professor and Former Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics of Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Lin’s research interests lie in development and application of scalable statistical and computational methods for analysis of massive data from genome, exposome and phenome, such as large-scale Whole Genome Sequencing studies, integrative analysis of different types of data, biobanks, as well as analysis of complex epidemiological and observational studies, and statistical learning methods for big data.

 

 

Dr Brian Munkombwe
Health scientist/Statistician
National Center for Health Statistics

Dr Brian Munkombwe is currently a Health Scientist with the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the National Center for Health Statistics where he works on mortality statistics analysis for the International Statistics Program. He is also currently serving as a mortality surveillance point of contact for the CDC’s International Task Force (ITF) on COVID-19 pandemic to assist countries (through CDC country offices) on rapid mortality surveillance and data analysis, including excess mortality calculations attributable to COVID-19. He also serves as a technical lead for the Bloomberg Data for Health (D4H) initiative supporting Zambia and Lesotho to improve their civil registration and vital statistics.

 

 

Dr Andrew Noymer
Associate Professor
Population Health and Disease Prevention
University of California, Irvine

Professor Andrew Noymer (associate professor of population health & disease prevention, University of California, Irvine) is a public health demographer specializing in infectious disease mortality. Prof Noymer’s work has focused on population-level aspects of respiratory pathogens, including influenza, tuberculosis, and measles. He has developed a number of estimation strategies for seasonal infectious disease burden, including negative binomial Serfling regression approaches for the 2009 influenza pandemic, and pseudoseasonal life expectancy. Selective mortality effects of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic are a major subject of Dr Noymer’s work. Other work has included seasonality of serum vitamin D levels in the United States. His recent work has also included novel methodologies for mortality analysis, such as convex hulls. Noymer’s work focuses on integrating technical demography, social demography, history, and biology, to better understand disease burden in its full human impact. Prof Noymer holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral training included NICHD and NIA traineeships in demography. He also obtained an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; his undergraduate studies (AB, biology) were completed at Harvard.

 

Dr Bernardo Queiroz
Associate Professor
Department of Demography
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Dr Queiroz is an Associate Professor at the Department of Demography and a researcher at CEDEPLAR at the University Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), since 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the University of California at Berkeley (2005). He specializes in economic demography, population aging, and mortality and health. He also has strong interests in demographic methods, indirect techniques, and regional and urban economics. Currently, his research is centered on two main topics: a) small-area mortality estimation with defective data. The project combines traditional demographic methods – death distribution methods – to Bayesian statistics to produce estimates of life expectancy at the city level, to focus on both overall mortality levels as well as mortality by causes of deaths; and b) studying how demographic changes are related to the changes in the labor market in developing countries. He is studying retirement trends, changes in occupation over time and across cohorts and how changes in the composition of the labor force impacts on the performance of different age groups in Latin America. He is working with Piedad Urdinola on a research project to build a human mortality database for Latin American (www.lamortalidad.org). He is also part of the NTA Project, coordinated by Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason.

 

Owen Phillips
Senior Analyst
Statistics Canada

Mr Owen Phillips has been an employee of Statistics Canada for nearly 25 years, having worked on a variety of sample and administrative surveys, both as a survey methodologist and as an analyst. He has spent much of the last ten years as a senior analysts with the Vital Statistics Program. Since April, he has collaborated with a team of survey statisticians and demographers to produce monthly estimates of excess mortality in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; and, led the team of analysts responsible for interpreting an summarizing the data in an effort to inform Canadians of the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic.

 

 

Dr Timothy Riffe
Research Scientist
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Lab of Population Health

Dr. Timothy Riffe is a research scientist of health and mortality at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He develops methods of direct and indirect measurement to better compare trends and levels of life expectancy and healthy life expectancy between populations. He also develops visualization methods for demographic data, open source packages that implement demographic methods, and he has worked on database development projects, including the Human Mortality Database, and more recent COVID Age Database (COVerAGE-DB). From May, 2021 he will be an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at the University of the Basque Country.

 

 

Dr John Sandberg
Associate Professor
Department of Global Health
The George Washington University

Dr John Sandberg is an associate professor in the department of Global Health in the School of Public Health at the George Washington University. Trained as a demographer, his research has spanned areas concerning children’s time use and socialization, attitudes concerning violence against women, social network influences on health and health behaviors and the estimation of excess mortality after natural disasters. Dr. Sandberg was responsible for the overall direction of and implementation of excess mortality estimation in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria for the George Washington University. He has also published work concerning how variation in research design, model assumptions and specification can lead to variation in the estimation of excess mortality.

 

 

Dr Vladimir M. Shkolnikov
Research Scientist
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Dr Vladimir M. Shkolnikov is a Research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock (Germany) and an Academic supervisor of the International Laboratory for Population and Health at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow (Russia). He is a Director of the Human Mortality Database Project. In 2000-18 he served as the Head of the Laboratory of Demographic Data at MPIDR. Since the 1990s, he has been involved in scientific projects on the role of alcohol and other factors of excess mortality in Russia. His scientific interests include measurement and decomposition of life expectancy and life disparity, social inequality in the face of death, longevity in vanguard populations, health and social change in Eastern Europe, biomarker research on the elderly, database projects devoted to consistent causeof- death series, intra-annual mortality fluctuations, and survival to exceptionally high ages.

 

 

Omar Seidu
Head, Demographic Statistics & SDGs Coordinator
Demographic & Social Statistics
Ghana Statistical Service

Mr Omar Seidu is a social statistician with about 20 years’ experience in the statistics production process. He has extensive expertise in survey sampling, design of survey instruments, implementation of sample surveys and he is a social and demographic statistics instructor. Omar is a Fellow of the Sampling Programme for Survey Statisticians and member of the United Nations Inter Agency and Expert Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (IAEG-SDGs). Omar is member of the National Technical Coordinating Committee on COVID-19 and serves on several other international committees/platforms on data for development. Omar coordinates data for monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana and currently championing data innovation, multistakeholder approach to data production and utilization and the building of robust administrative data system. He is credited with brokering strategic partnerships and mobilizing resources for the statistical system in Ghana. Omar is not only passionate about strengthening the data ecosystem, but also the uptake of evidence in decision making.

 

Dr Carolina Santamaría Ulloa
Director
Health Research Institute
University of Costa Rica

Carolina Santamaría-Ulloa is the Director of the Health Research Institute, and an Associate Professor at the Public Health and the Human Nutrition Graduate and Undergraduate Programs at the University of Costa Rica. Morbidity and mortality are the focus of her research agenda. For the last ten years she has been a principal investigator of projects seeking to assess the impact the current epidemiological profile has on the healthcare system. Demographic methods used in her previous research on seasonal variation of mortality, and on mortality data quality in different countries are relevant to understanding excess mortality in a pandemic. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sociology Ph.D. program, her specialty areas are Demography and Population Health. She has been employed for the last ten years as a researcher and professor at the University of Costa Rica, and has sixteen years of experience working at the Costa Rican Ministry of Health. Additionally, she held a postdoctoral position at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.

 

Dr Teke Johnson Takwa
Director, Department for Studies, Research and Publications
Central Bureau for Censuses and Population Studies

Dr Teke Johnson Takwa heads the Department for Studies, Research and Publications at the Central Bureau for Censuses and Population Studies (BUCREP) in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He was previously a Demographer and Unit Head for Data Analysis in BUCREP until 2019. He led the Supervisory team for the Pilot Phase of the 4th General Population and Housing Census of Cameroon in 2019.

 

 

Dr Esther van Kleef
Senior Epidemiologist
Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp

Esther van Kleef is a senior epidemiologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, with a strong quantitative skill-set including mathematical modelling, advanced statistical methodology and handling of surveillance data. She is funded to work on improving the detection, monitoring and assessment of infectious disease emergence in Europe, exploring the potential for state-of-the-art big data mining and analyses techniques (H2020 MOOD). Esther has completed a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This was followed by a track record of academic and public health roles at Oxford University, Public Health England and the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment. Over the years she has developed a keen interest in understanding the transmission-dynamics of pathogens and effectiveness of interventions, having largely focused on antimicrobial resistance. In 2019-2020, she has been involved as a WHO consultant in the 10th outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is a strong advocate for the implementation of data science in outbreak related decision-making (outbreak analytics) with an interdisciplinary focus.

 

Dr Haidong Wang
Associate Professor
Department of Health Metrics Sciences
University of Washington

Haidong Wang, PhD, is an associate professor of Health Metrics Sciences in the Department of Health Metrics Sciences and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle. A specialist in demography and global public health, Dr. Wang works on demographic estimation for IHME’ landmark Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) and currently leads both the Demographic work group and the China subnational GBD study group. Dr. Wang also led the GBD’s efforts in improving HIV/AIDS burden of disease estimates for the GBD2015, GBD2016 and GBD2017 iterations. In addition, he also works on small area estimation of key population health metrics including life expectancy, under-five mortality rate and maternal mortality ratio. He holds BAs in Sociology and Economics from Peking University and PhD in Demography from University of Pennsylvania.

 

 

Dr Jon Wakefield
Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics
University of Washington

Dr Wakefield has conducted research on: population pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling, ecological inference, disease mapping, epidemiological study design, cluster detection, genetic epidemiology, small area estimation and space-time modeling of infectious disease data. He spent two sabbaticals at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France. He is an affiliate member in the Vaccine and Infectious Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an Affiliate with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) and a Research Affiliate with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS). For the past 10 years, Dr Wakefield been working on methods for modeling health and demographic outcomes in a low and medium incomes (LMIC) setting, and in particular on small-area estimation. Since 2016, Dr Wakefield has been collaborating with the United Nations (UN) Inter-agency group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME) on methods for subnational estimation of child mortality. Since October, 2018, he has been on the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for IGME. He is also a member of the UN TAGs for maternal mortality and stillbirths estimation. The team he leads has just produced the first UN subnational estimates of under-5 mortality in 22 countries.