Krycia Cowling

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

I started out in college as pre-med, and as I studied more, I realized that if I were to end up working as a physician, I would be frustrated not being able to do something for a patient before they developed a condition. I liked the idea of taking a broader and more preventative approach to the same goal. I did two public health-related studies abroad. One was in Zimbabwe on an HIV-prevention research project. We examined a community-based intervention that trained community leaders in ways to spread prevention messages to their peers. I also spent time in Ecuador, taking courses in public health and tropical diseases while going through a Spanish immersion program.

What work are you doing at IHME?

As part of the Common Indicators group, I’m looking at education as a determinant of health. We’re taking all available census and survey data and trying to estimate the number of years of education that the average person has in every country from 1950 until present, by age and sex, for every country in the world. I’m also helping research a time series for tobacco consumption per capita. I didn’t know anything about computer programming when I came here, but now I feel quite comfortable using the Stata programming language, for example, to look at all the respondents in one age and sex group and then, by using the weights that are part of the sample design, come up with a nationally representative estimate.

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

I would like to go into policy in some way. In the policy role, you take the research we are creating and implement it so it has value. Being on this side of the research, I now understand how the work is created and what it takes to make the research credible. I used to read an article in a journal and assume the authors’ methods were valid without questioning the methodology much. This fellowship has definitely made me look at things much more critically to decide what is and is not good research. It’s automatic now to ask: “Are they using an appropriate model? Are there biases in their research? Is the sample representative?” I would like to take that same kind of critical thinking into the policy world.

Published Works