My research covers a variety of topics in statistics and data science, typically motivated by scientific questions in global health, economics, demography, and sociology. Recent projects include estimating features of social networks (e.g. the degree of clustering or how central an individual is) using data from standard surveys, inferring a likely cause of death (when deaths happen outside of hospitals) using reports from surviving caretakers, and quantifying & communicating uncertainty in predictive models for global health policymakers. More information about OpenVA, our suite of open tools to manage and analyze verbal autopsy surveys, is available here.

I’m the former Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. I’m excited and humbled to be a 2019 recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

I currently have multiple openings for postdoctoral collaborators. For more information and to apply directly please see here.

Technical reports and working papers

Please see arXiv for the most up to date list of working papers.

• Identifying the latent space geometry of network models through analysis of curvature (overview and code)
• Spectral goodness-of-fit tests for complete and partial network data (overview and code)
• Sequential estimation of temporally evolving latent space network models
• Smart Containment with Active Learning: A Proposal for a Data-Responsive and Graded Approach to COVID-19 (more details)
• Consistently estimating graph statistics using Aggregated Relational Data (overview and code)
• Estimating spillovers using imprecisely measured networks (code)
• Verbal Autopsy in Civil Registration and Vital Statistics: The Symptom-Cause Information Archive
• Quantifying the contributions of training data and algorithm logic to the performance of automated cause-assignment algorithms for verbal autopsy
• Examining Racial Segregation in Associative Networks on Twitter
• Migrants, information, and working conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories

Affiliations

• University of Washington
  • Associate Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Sociology.
  • Core faculty member, Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.
  • Senior Data Science Fellow, eScience Institute.
  • Research affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.
  • Faculty partner, Responsible AI Systems & Experiences (RAISE).