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CSDE Staff

Jessica Godwin

Statistical Demographer & Training Director

Office: Raitt Hall 218C


Jessica Godwin is a Statistical Demographer and the Training Director for the Demographic Methods Certificate Program with CSDE. In her role as a Statistical Demographer, she will support the research of CSDE Affiliates and Trainees via consulting and the organization and facilitation of CSDE Workshops. Dr. Godwin received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington in 2021 and also completed CSDE’s Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods. She was also the recipient of two CSDE fellowships, one from NICHD and one from the Shanahan Endowment. Her dissertation work examined how to best estimate child mortality from various sources and to improve upon national and subnational estimates in places with sparse data.  As part of that effort, she led a study with CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield published in Statistics in Medicine that developed space-time modeling techniques for subnational child mortality estimates in low and middle-income countries. Subnational estimations of child mortality for 22 countries developed in collaboration with UN IGME can be found at https://childmortality.org/. Her broad research interests are demography, Bayesian spatiotemporal methods, survey statistics, and the places where all of those things overlap.  She was born and raised in Alabama and received her M.S. in Statistics at Auburn University. Her thesis, titled “Group lasso for functional logistic regression”, was advised by Nedret Billor. She also received a B.S. in Actuarial Science. To read more about Dr. Godwin, visit her website: https://jlgodwin.github.io/.