David Coomes
Postdoctoral Researcher, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
David Coomes, PhD, MPH, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. He is currently working on the ‘Leveraging Data for Infants with Cleft to Grow and Flourish’ study led by Dr. Christy McKinney, which uses electronic health record data to support improved growth outcomes among children born with cleft lip or palate. In addition to this, he is working on projects examining biomarkers for children experiencing malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia as well as the impact of multiplex testing for HIV and other STIs among pregnant and high-risk populations for the World Health Organization. David’s work broadly focuses on using computational and demographic methods to measure social determinants of health and geographic health disparities. He received his PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington where he was a funded T32 Fellow in the Data Science and Demography Training Program at CSDE. David received an MPH in Global Health and a BS in Biology at the UW and prior to graduate school worked as a wildland firefighter. His work has been published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, Current Environmental Health Reports, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The American Journal of Surgical Pathology, and BMJ Open.