Susanna Makela

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

It was near the end of fall semester of my senior year in college, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do after I graduated. I knew that I wanted to go to grad school for applied math at some point, but I wasn’t ready to go straight out of undergrad. I wanted to find a job that would allow me to stay in academia and do something at least quantitative, if not mathematical. I read the description of the PBF program on the Web site of the Economics department at Brown, and my eye caught on the phrases “write statistical code,” “prepare posters and manuscripts for publication,” and “field experience in a developing country.” I also wanted a job that had the potential to have a real impact on serious problems in the world, not just more abstract mathematical ones.

What work are you doing at IHME?

I’m in the Causes of Death group. I started out working on vital registration data and redistributing what we call “garbage codes” so that the data are cleaner and contain causes that are informative from a policy standpoint. I’m currently taking datasets with causes that are not quite at the level of detail that we would like and trying to add a higher level of detail. For example, we may have data on deaths coded to “malignant neoplasms,” which are cancers, but what we really want are data on deaths coded to lung, liver, stomach, esophageal, and breast cancer. It’s important to have our data at a sufficiently high level of detail so that we can use them to help predict cause-of-death patterns in places where we have no vital registration data at all.

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

This is my last year at IHME. I’m the only fellow in my cohort not staying a third year to do a Master of Public Health. I’m planning on finding work in a developing country setting next year and then applying to graduate school in the fall. I’m looking into PhD programs in applied math. I’m not sure what I want to do after that, but I could see myself working in a setting similar to IHME where I can work with the mathematical methods and concepts that I find most interesting while still applying them to global problems.

Published Works