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CSDE Committees: Executive Committee Member

CSDE Research Areas:

• Demographic Measurements and Methods
• Health of People and Populations

In the News:

• Congratulations to Award Recipients for Best Posters during CSDE’s Virtual Lightning Talks and Poster Session! (3/21/2020)
• CSDE Awarded NIH Training Grant for Advanced Data Analytics, Demography & Population Health (10/19/2020)
• CSDE Trainee Accepted at International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (10/14/2019)
• CSDE’s Spring Quarter Seminar Series Finalized! (3/23/2021)
• Estimating Total Fertility from the Shape of the Age Pyramid: Bayesian Models and Applications (5/10/2021)
• Godwin and Wakefield Publish Research on Space-Time Modeling of Child Mortality in LMICs (2/22/2021)
• Marquez and Wakefield Publish New Research on Innovative Methods for Harmonizing Child Mortality Data Across Disparate Geographic Levels (2/22/2021)
• Spotlight on Neal Marquez, Fall 2018 Lightning Talks and Poster Session Winner (1/18/2019)
• Spring Course Announcement: Advanced Spatial Statistics for Public and Global Health (BIOST/STAT 578 A) (2/29/2020)
• Wakefield on WHO Technical Advisory Group That Develops Model for Excess Mortality Estimation (5/24/2021)
• Yuan Hsiao Examines Gender Network Dynamics of Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior in Adolescence (2/22/2019)
• Wakefield Awarded Funding to Lead UNICEF & UW Research on Subnational Mortality Among Children Under 5 (10/22/2021)
• Small Area Estimation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (11/12/2021)
• New York Times Quotes Wakefield in New Article on WHO’s COVID Death Toll Calculations (4/15/2022)
• Wilson & Wakefield Analyze Summary and Birth History Data through Modeling Advancements in New Research (9/2/2022)
• Wakefield Highlighted in UW Today for Work on Controversial WHO COVID Mortality Estimates (8/18/2022)
• Wakefield Publishes on the Relationship between Pertussis Vaccination and Incidence (5/21/2023)
• Wakefield Publishes New Article on Small Area Estimation with Random Forests and the LASSO (9/8/2023)

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Jonathan Wakefield’s primary research area is in the development of methods for spatial epidemiology with a particular interest in sources of, and methods for the removal of, ecological bias. He studies Bayesian data analysis, statistical methods in epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and pharmacodynamic models. This interest began when he was the head of the Statistics group within the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College. This government funded unit carried out investigations using routinely collected cancer data in the United Kingdom, primarily to determine the role of the environment. Wakefield has worked in study design with a series of papers developing a case-control within ecological design which is both powerful and removes ecological bias via the judicial choice of cases and controls. In a similar vein, two-phase methods have also been applied in the spatial context. A different endeavor is cluster detection (surveillance) with Wakefield and Albert Kim (a recent graduate student in the Statistics department) developing a Bayesian method that overcomes many of the drawbacks of frequentist methods (multiple testing and inability to discuss more than one cluster in a dataset). More recently, Wakefield has been working on infectious disease data, specifically data on malaria and hand, foot and mouth disease. The website http://faculty.washington.edu/jonno/spatialepi.html contains details on Wakefield’s work in spatial epidemiology.