Spencer James

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

I have been interested in global health for a couple of years and took Chris Murray’s class last fall and got a sense of what IHME studies. It seemed like these methods and strategies are great tools to have. I studied Arabic in Lebanon in 2008, and I spent a portion of my program with an NGO that worked with refugees. It was quite a humbling experience, seeing the condition of one little clinic in one refugee camp and the kind of problems it can have. It makes the prospect of wanting to do meaningful work on a global scale that much more challenging.

At the same time, it was inspiring to see the reactions of individual patients to the care that their doctor was giving them and to the generosity of the NGO. It makes you realize that global health work can make people’s lives better.

What work are you doing at IHME?

I’m in the Common Indicators group, working on completing our data file for GDP per capita across all countries over the past century. Some of the data already existed. I had to update our existing data sources and then create a new way to combine all the historical and new data into one average. The next step is to try to fill in the missing values and to project the trends both forward and backward in time. We’re using multiple imputation software to fill in some of the values. Once we have the GDP numbers, they will be interesting in their own right, but they will also become factors for other areas of research here.

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

I hope to continue on to graduate school, be it in public health or population studies. I would like to continue working in academia in some way. The level of skepticism that I have developed here will definitely be useful in the future. We are learning to question our assumptions going into a project – the nature of what we are looking for and also the standards that have been set. The ability to look at one’s field and the underlying assumptions and apply rigorous tests in an objective way is a challenging but necessary task. Learning and applying this philosophy has been really valuable.

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