Leslie Mallinger

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

I’m interested in math, biology, and medicine, and this felt like a great opportunity that fell into the intersection of those three interests. I went into college wanting to be a math major, and biology kind of took over my interest partway through. I really like learning about the way humans work internally, all those mechanisms that are going on behind the scenes, and I also was interested in helping people.

What work are you doing at IHME?

I’m in the Common Indicators group, and we are putting together a database so that everyone can have consistent sources of country-specific information to use throughout IHME. I am also working on a project involving access to diabetes interventions in various countries. We are looking at prevalence, coverage, and effective coverage, which means that we are determining how many people are diabetic, whether diabetics are getting the treatment that they need, and whether that treatment is working. We’re also focusing on diabetics who have high blood pressure and high cholesterol because diabetes is so closely related to these conditions.

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

I am applying for the Master of Public Health program. I could see myself going into the policy side of health or continuing to work in evaluations and measurement. The thing that has stuck with me so far is how important accurate data are and how important it is to get that knowledge into the right hands. I also really like the principle of transparency that we have here. We want everyone to be able to see how we did our research and be able to replicate it.

Published Works