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Haidong Wang, Post-Graduate FellowDatong, China
PhD, Demography
University of Pennsylvania MA, Economics In his early 20s, Haidong Wang became fascinated with the final years of life. At the University of Pennsylvania, he started researching new ways to use population demographics to explain trends in aging in the US and China. His work was based in part on a tabulation of deaths in every age group – known as a modified logit model life table – that was created by IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray and other researchers. After joining IHME as a fellow in 2008, Haidong has worked directly with Dr. Murray on creating a new model life table that is one of the foundational pieces for the ambitious Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. He is helping estimate age-specific mortality rates for nearly every country in the world going back to 1950. Most high-income countries count all births and deaths through a government registration system. But in low-income countries, those systems can be incomplete or nonexistent. The model life table helps IHME fill in the gaps where countries are unable to provide complete data on births and deaths. Haidong’s work is an extension of his demography work at Penn. There, he helped find a new way to calculate sex differences in US adult mortality due to differences in cigarette smoking between men and women. “Researchers have tended to look at the current smoking prevalence and the current mortality rate, but that doesn’t make much sense because smoking doesn’t kill you in the year that you start smoking,” Haidong said. “What I have tried to do, and what we do here at IHME, is to look at the long-term trends and find out how risk factors such as smoking are playing out decades later.” At IHME, Haidong has examined historical data for developed countries, including the US, UK, Sweden, and parts of South Africa. For some countries, vital registration data goes back to 1800. By looking at trends in mortality for those countries, he is able to use statistical formulas to predict trends in countries that are missing data. To generate age-specific mortality numbers, Haidong starts with comprehensive adult and child mortality estimates from IHME’s Mortality group. By putting those numbers into the new model life table system, he is able to estimate the number of deaths at each age from birth through age 105. “We’re constantly trying to expand the evidence base at IHME,” Haidong said. “When we started building this model life table, we had around 1,800 country years. Now we have more than 8,000. We’re hoping as we go forward, we will be able to go even further.” Selected Publications:
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