Research

Please see the Publications tab for a complete list of my published research.

I believe in a problem-forward approach to research. I start with the problem to be addressed and then work to develop methodology and tools to solve it, rather than starting with a specific toolset and trying to use it for whatever arises. There is no one-size-fits-all tool in a statistical arsenal, so having a large knowledge base from which to draw methodology facilitates the ability to flexibly and effectively solve the problems that are actually of interest.

Global Health

Currently, I lead the Population, Fertility, and Mortality Research Team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an outstanding group of researchers and staff that develops methodology and produces estimates of all-cause mortality, fertility, and population for the Global Burden of Disease study (Schumacher and Kyu et al., 2024; Schumacher and Bhattacharjee et al., 2024; Comfort et al., 2024). Additionally, our team is involved in numerous other research projects involving demographic estimates, such as modeling neonatal, infant, and child mortality at the second administrative level of geography in all countries across the globe. While at IHME, I have also collaborated on numerous other areas of research within the Global Burden of Disease study, as well as other research teams across the institute.

Statistical Methodology

My technical specialties have centered on Bayesian methods, small area estimation, survey methodology, and statistical demography. I have worked on many projects relating to statistical methods development for global health problems, such as age- and cause-specific child mortality estimation (Schumacher et al., 2022), joint small area estimation models for multiple outcomes, and analysis of complex survey data. I also have experience with a variety of other statistical techniques, including maximum likelihood methods and machine learning.

Collaborative research

I value truly collaborative research. I’ve worked with researchers from various institutes and backgrounds, including IHME, the University of Washington, the WHO, the UN, Johns Hopkins University, and the Mozambique Institute for Health Education and Research. These projects have included spatiotemporal modeling of under-five mortality, spatial modeling of gun violence in the US (Gause et al., 2024), investigating the role of collagen organization in cardiac fibroblast fate determination (Bugg et al., 2020), detecting perineural spread of palatal carcinoma (Lee et al., 2021), modeling associations between temporomandibular joint disorders various predictors (Lee et al., 2019), and incorporating selected non-communicable diseases into facility-based surveillance systems in low-resource settings (Mocumbi et al., 2019).