Abraham Flaxman, PhD, is a Professor of Health Metrics Science and Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is currently leading the development of new methods for cost effective analysis with microsimulation and is engaged in methodological and operational research on verbal autopsy. Dr. Flaxman has previously designed software tools such as DisMod-MR that IHME uses to estimate the Global Burden of Disease, and the Bednet Stock-and-Flow Model, which has produced estimates of insecticide-treated net coverage in sub-Saharan Africa. This work uses Integrative Systems Modeling to combine a system dynamics model of process with a statistical model of data to bring together all available sources of information.
Archives: Affiliates
Cerf, Benjamin
Benjamin Cerf an economist in the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and a Regional Research Affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. His research uses linked administrative and survey data to investigate experiences of marginalized populations. The first branch of his work investigates several aspects of U.S. antipoverty programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Earned Income Tax Credit, including non-participation, multiple program participation, and misreporting of participation in surveys. He has presented work using SNAP administrative records at meetings of the Association for Public Policy and Management, the American Statistical Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. Another branch of his work focuses on the demographics and labor market outcomes of transgender individuals living in the United States. This work has been presented at the Population Association of America and the Society of Labor Economists and was written about in the New York Times.
In addition to his scholarly research, Ben has been the lead developer of several products the Census Bureau provides to partner states that share administrative data from the SNAP, WIC, and TANF programs. His work in this area has involved working closely with representatives from states and other federal agencies to identify and address critical information needs, develop scalable suites of statistical programs to automatically generate reports, and communicate results to a wide variety of stakeholders.
Mercer, Laina
Laina Mercer is a Research Statistician at the Institute for Disease Modeling working to support initiatives related to polio eradication, vaccine delivery, and reproductive health. She holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington where her dissertation research was related to statistical methods for space-time smoothing of surveillance and complex survey data with applications in demography and public health. While at the University of Washington, Laina was a fellow at the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology and she served as Chair of Statistics in the Community (StatCom), a student-run volunteer organization which provides statistical consulting services free of charge to non-profit community and governmental groups.
Laina also holds an MS in Biostatistics from the University of Washington and a BS in Mathematics from Western Washington University. She previously worked with Seattle Children’s Research Institute in the Children’s Core for Biomedical Statistics, specifically in medical research for pediatric transplantation and surgery and at the Fred Hutch in the Tobacco & Health Behavior Science Research Group, investigating behavioral interventions for smoking cessation.
Morris, Julie
Julie Morris is Director of the Center for Social Science Instruction in the Department of Sociology at Western Washington University. Julie holds a BA in Sociology from Gonzaga University and an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington. Julie’s research interests focus on statistics, demography, and social determinants of health and medicalization; specifically as they relate to stress, health behaviors, and mental health outcomes. Julie came to Western after working as a Research Scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and as a Data Scientist for Starbucks.
Chen, Vivien
Dr. Vivien Chen is currently a research analyst at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC) of the State of Washington. She conducts performance auditing and evaluation on state-funded policies and programs. Prior to JLARC, Vivien was a research lead and coordinator for the Education Research & Data Center (ERDC), where she facilitated the build-up of the state student longitudinal administrative data warehouse and provided evidence-based research to inform policymaking.
Vivien received a doctoral degree in Education Policy Studies with a minor in Demography from The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on policy evaluation, educational equity and equality, demographic research method. Topics of her research include family structure, children of immigrants, school choice and neighborhood segregation, STEM learning, college financial aid, human capital cultivation, and education and workforce outcomes for children/youth in foster care or experiencing homelessness.
Sherr, Kenneth
Dr. Sherr’s research focuses on developing and testing practical solutions to support data-driven decision making and service integration into the Primary Health Care framework to improve health system coverage and quality. Dr. Sherr developed the Systems Analysis and Improvement Approach (SAIA), which packages systems engineering tools to support front-line health workers to iteratively improve prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services. Originally tested through a cluster randomized trial in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Mozambique, SAIA is currently being scaled-up for PMTCT services in Mozambique, and adapted to address other chronic care needs in low and middle-income countries (including mental health services, integrated HIV testing into family planning clinics, and pediatric HIV testing and linked treatment).
Dr. Sherr leads an implementation research project supported through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative that assesses the effectiveness of an enhanced audit and feedback intervention on implementation of national guidelines to address the main causes of neonatal mortality in Mozambique, and builds implementation research capacity for public sector officials.
Dr. Sherr has led the development of implementation science training curricula at the University of Washington Department of Global Health, including the development of the world’s first PhD program in implementation science. Dr. Sherr received his PhD in Epidemiology and MPH in International Health/Health Services from the University of Washington, and a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Kenyon College.
Garrison, Michelle
Child and adolescent sleep problems; interactions between media use, physical activity, and sleep, and the impact on health and behavior; development and testing of health behavior change interventions; pediatric inpatient quality of care and quality improvement research
Leung, ManChui
Lee, Hedwig
Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Duke University. She received her BS in Policy Analysis from Cornell University in 2003 and her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health from 2009 to 2011.
She is broadly interested in the social determinants and consequences of population health and health disparities, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity, poverty, race-related stress, and the family. Hedy’s research draws from multiple sources of data to investigate these relationships, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Chicago Community Adult Health Study, National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, National Health Interview Survey, National Survey of American Life, and Twitter. Hedy is very interested in engaging in interdisciplinary research and has published and worked with scholars across a wide range of fields including sociology, demography, psychology, political science, public health and medicine.
Her recent work examines the impact of family member incarceration on the health and attitudes of family members, association between discrimination and mental and physical health, documenting trends in racial/ethnic health disparities, socioeconomic causes and consequences of obesity in childhood and adolescence, and using social media data for demographic and health research. Hedy currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on topics related to racial/ethnic health disparities and the social determinants of population health.
Rosenfeld, Jake
Jake Rosenfeld (Phd, Princeton University) is Professor of Sociology at Washington University-St. Louis, and Faculty Affiliate of the Sociology Department at the University of Washington, where he taught from 2007-2015. His research and teaching focuses on the political and economic determinants of inequality in the advanced democracies. He is primarily interested in who gets paid what and why – and how this varies across time and place. In his work Rosenfeld examines major developments that have disrupted past practices of wage-setting, especially labor union decline and the resulting changes in the ways firms allocate wages.
Rosenfeld has published research in various outlets, including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Foreign Affairs. His book, What Unions No Longer Do, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014, and covered in a range of publications, including the New York Times and New Yorker. His forthcoming book, You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy will be published by Harvard University Press in January, 2021.