CSDE is pleased to announce that Dr. Jessica Godwin has accepted our offer to join CSDE’s Science and Training Cores and joins us fulltime on January 18th!  Welcome Jessica!

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 – the scientific sibling of demography!  Jessica joins CSDE as a Statistical Demographer and the science core is delighted to welcome her to the team.  In addition, Dr. Godwin is picking up the leadership reins of CSDE’s Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods. We can’t think of a better trained statistician and demographer to take up that mantle.  The training core is very pleased to know that it will benefit from Jessica’s good ideas, generosity towards students, and thoughtful advice for students’ successes.  To read more about Dr. Godwin, visit her website: https://jlgodwin.github.io/.