Spencer James

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

As an undergraduate, I was interested in the overlap between biological anthropology and public health, specifically how health systems can be adapted in different settings and to different populations. Biological anthropology also sparked my interest in population dynamics and disease, and many aspects of this fellowship expose me to interactions between the two. This fellowship was recommended to me by my honors advisor, who had worked with the burden of disease unit at Harvard. He described it as the perfect opportunity to gain practical research experience and training simultaneously.

What work are you doing at IHME?

In the Mortality group, I’m doing “data hunting” to find mortality data for countries on which we have very sparse information, such as Botswana and the Dominican Republic. I’m working specifically with surveys that have asked, “How many members have died in your house in the last 12 months?” We call these household deaths. We’re looking at data inventories from various organizations and finding where they have data and we don’t. If we are missing a specific survey, we find it, convert it, and enter it into our database.

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.

Published Works