What attracted you to the health metrics field?
Global health has always been a central focus for me, though I approached the field from a largely qualitative perspective during college. After graduating, I worked for a year at a clinic in the Haitian Central Plateau, which caused me to reevaluate many of the beliefs I held about foreign aid and public health interventions.
I started thinking more critically about questions, such as, What criteria should be used to prioritize health problems? How should funding be distributed between numerous potential solutions? How can we evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and subsequently respond to these findings? I became interested in developing the quantitative skills required to answer these questions, and IHME was a natural fit.
What work are you doing at IHME?
I'm a member of the Health Service Delivery Constraints research team. Our team works to identify and quantify bottlenecks that prevent people from getting care, considering both demand and supply-side constraints.
I have been working primarily on the supply side of this question, examining how factors within a health facility, such as the availability and quality of personnel and drugs, affect the services they provide patients. My role ranges from analyzing facility-level data to working on the survey tools used to collect this data.
How do you think your experience at IHME will contribute to your future work?
Broadly, I see myself working to address the root causes of health inequities. There are numerous ways I could approach this, from policy to research to on-the-ground implementation. IHME is a good place for me to gain exposure to a variety of potential career trajectories, while developing skills that will be applicable in virtually any one of these paths. No matter what your role is, it's always beneficial to have an understanding of how statistics are arrived at, so that you can critically assess them rather than automatically accepting what you are given.
Ultimately, I hope to take the skills I learn here and teach them to others, perhaps in the developing world. Regardless of how passionate I am about global health, I’m only one person. Giving others the inspiration and skills to take on these challenges can have a multiplicative or even exponential impact.
