Jacob Marcus

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

I was looking for something where I could apply my background in math. As an undergrad, most of what I did was abstract – theorems, definitions, and proofs. It’s really fun because a lot of the problems are like riddles, but it’s a new challenge to figure out the best way to apply math to the real world. I just happened on an advertisement for a position at IHME in The Economist. I went to the Web site and found out they had this Post-Bachelor Fellowship. I was ecstatic to find something that was exactly what I was looking for.

What work are you doing at IHME?

In the Mortality group, I’m helping find out how countries are making progress toward one of the Millennium Development Goals, which is to reduce the mortality of children under age 5. We are producing estimates for every country in the world on under-5 mortality. We are trying to make the methods more objective and to combine data from a wider variety of sources than has been attempted before. I am also working on adult mortality, where much less data exist. The global health community has made a big commitment to measure child mortality, but besides a few diseases like HIV, TB, and malaria, there has been less of a focus on adult mortality. I have been working on methods to find out how many deaths are missing from each country’s official record. We are figuring out ways to look at the population through censuses, death registrations, and surveys to try to make things consistent.

How do you think your experience at IHME will contribute to your future work?

I am earning my Master of Public Health, and I see myself continuing to work in health metrics. I’m interested in doing the research part of it but also working on the interface between policy and research. It’s the concept of translational research, where you have the basic research and then the clinical side. You need something to translate between those two sides. The analogous framework for health metrics would be what we are doing here, which is building the evidence base, and then the clinical side would be the policy part, putting these ideas into action.

Published Works