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Lisa Rosenfeld , Post-Bachelor Fellow

Stamford, CT
BA, Government
Harvard University

What attracted you to the health metrics field?

I have had a couple of interesting and formative experiences in global health. I spent several weeks one summer doing medical outreach for a water sanitation project near San Jose, Costa Rica. We were tracking the rates of parasitic illness before and after this sanitation project. I spent the next summer in Tanzania looking at the role of computers in public health. Both of those experiences showed me how problematic data from under-resourced settings can be. I wanted to work for an organization that would teach me how to interpret and use data with an eye for potential biases.

What work are you doing at IHME?

I’m in the Effective Coverage group and am working on two projects right now. I’m looking at the effective coverage of contraception in developing countries. We’re trying to assess who needs contraception and who is getting it and those are complicated questions. We are trying to come up with acceptable and measurable definitions, which makes the work exciting. It lets me tap into both the qualitative and quantitative sides of my mind. My second project involves looking at the scale up of anti-retroviral therapy for HIV. We don’t have reliable data for all the components that go into effective coverage, but we’re going to try to develop a model that will give us a trend starting around 1999 and ending in 2010.

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

In the near future, I would like to go to medical school to gain clinical skills that will complement the quantitative skills I am gaining at IHME. Ultimately, I hope to find work that involves aspects of health policy, public health, and clinical medicine. Wherever I end up, I feel confident that learning how to ask the right questions and how to figure out the best way to answer them are invaluable skills. To get the right diagnosis or to get to the bottom of a policy challenge, I am gaining critical skills at IHME that will serve me well in the future.

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