Taking a break from field research in Costa Rica

I’m currently a Lecturer in the School of Demography at the Australian National University. I was formerly a David E. Bell fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and completed my Ph.D. in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center. My substantive research is focused on global health, life-course approaches to aging, and inequality. My research integrates approaches from demography, sociology, epidemiology, and biostatistics to improve empirical and theoretical models of population health in low-resource contexts, and provides specific contributions on life-course approaches to aging and disability, international comparisons of health and mortality, and the population-level health effects of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

I plan to focus my future research on developing new and innovative ways to answer key questions of global demography—how long we live, how health is maintained across the life-course, and how specific diseases (particularly chronic non-communicable diseases and HIV/AIDS) affect present and future health outcomes. In addition to my substantive work, I am interested in developing and improving the estimation of macro-level population processes using micro-level longitudinal data, and advancing formal demographic techniques for calculating cohort life expectancy and mortality patterns. I received an NSF-Graduate Research Fellowship and a School of Arts and Sciences dissertation completion grant to support my doctoral studies, and was a fellow in the Young Scientist Summer Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in 2012.