I work as a professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University (OSU), and I am a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Population Research and the Translational Data Analytics Institute, both at OSU. I am affiliated with the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington and the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand.

I work to improve: 1) verbal autopsy as a tool to measure the burden of disease, 2) mathematical models of human mortality, 3) indirect estimates of child mortality, and 4) small-area estimates of mortality. I also coordinate a small team developing open-source software to implement new methods - mostly for verbal autopsy and mathematical models of human mortality.

I lead the openVA Team that works to improve verbal autopsy. I have been a member of the WHO Verbal Autopsy Reference Group (VARG) since it was formed in 2013. Over the past several years I have been an active member of the VARG Task Group coordinating a comprehensive update of the WHO Standard Verbal Autopsy Instrument. The openVA Team develops and maintains tools that support the WHO standard.

I am also a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Health Statistics that is developing a global strategy on strengthening national mortality data systems to improve the availability, quality, and use of mortality data for public health action.

Updates

2026-03

In my dissertation, I built a simple set of model life tables based on mortality data from the INDEPTH Network sites. The latest iteration of this idea is demonstrated in a shiny app using life tables from the human mortality database (HMD) - give it a spin.

2025-12

With a team including Doris Ma Fat, Philippe Boucher, and George Vasilache at the Data, Digital Health, Analytics and AI Department (DDA) of the WHO; Kobus Herbst and Brendan Gilbert at AHRI; and Norman Goco and David Plotner at RTI; the openVA Team has just completed creation of the Reference Data Archive at WHO: https://data.who.int/rda.