Farshad Pourmalek

While working as a public health physician in a rural area of Iran, Farshad Pourmalek made a career choice.

Then just a few years out of medical school, Farshad was working in a small clinic vaccinating children against a variety of diseases. But Farshad came to believe that immunizing these children was just a small piece of a very big picture. It was the country itself that needed to be protected against a growing list of public health threats.

Farshad went back to school to earn his Master of Public Health degree and continues to study public health problems from both an inpidual and a global perspective at IHME. Farshad was encouraged to apply for the IHME fellowship by Mohsen Naghavi, one of Farshad’s professors in Tehran and now one of IHME’s lead researchers and an Assistant Professor of Global Health at the UW. The two had worked together on the country’s first national burden of disease project.

At IHME, Farshad is working on a new disease burden study for Iran that will become the model for future Global Burden of Disease studies in other countries. He also works as one of IHME’s clinical experts, taking data and converting them into years lived with disability, or YLDs.

Farshad said his years as a rural physician continue to inform his analytical work by grounding him in patient care.

“You have to make sure that whatever models you are using or estimates you are making are consistent with what is happening in reality in the field,” Farshad said. “Because of my background, combined with what I have learned at IHME, I can see rather quickly whether something makes sense or whether it is simply a mathematical possibility that has no real relationship to patients.”

In Iran, Farshad helped lead a groundbreaking study comparing private sector and public sector efforts to improve maternal and child health.

“Government spending alone wasn’t adequate to reduce the amount of death and disease among mothers and their children,” Farshad said.

By comparing the volume of services with disease outcomes and costs, Farshad and his fellow researchers showed that the private sector could effectively fill gaps left by government. “At IHME, this isn’t just about numbers,” he said. “We always are looking for the best ways to ultimately have an impact at the patient level and at the population level.”

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