People
Leontine Alkema
Principal Investigator
Leontine is Professor of Biostatistics at UMass Amherst. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington in Seattle, focusing on Bayesian modeling and Statistical Demography. She started her PhD with the goal to work at the United Nations but left on an academic track, loving research and teaching, and collaborating with global organizations to improve estimates and projections for demographic and health outcomes. After some time in Asia at the National University of Singapore, she returned to the US and is enjoying life in the Pioneer valley. Leontine loves Dutch apple pie and little art projects and adventures with her family.
Chi Hyun Lee
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Chi Hyun is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at UMass Amherst. She received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on development of statistical methodologies for survival outcomes in observational studies. With the Alkema lab, Chi Hyun works on developing new measures of family planning that account for sexual activity.
Herb Susmann
Postdoctoral fellow
Herb's research interests are in Bayesian modeling and computation. His current work involves Bayesian modeling of transition processes applied to contraceptive use.
Zhengfan Wang
Postdoctoral fellow
In the Alkema lab, Zhengfan has worked on Bayesian sparsity and hierarchical temporal Bayesian models for the estimation of stillbirth rates globally. He is current working on the project to estimate of family planning indicators for low- and middle-income countries, disaggrated by geographic region and various demographic characteristics. His focus is on modeling in data limited settings.
Chuchu Wei
PhD Candidate Biostatistics
Chuchu's dissertation research is on the improved use of survey data that is subject to self-reporting errors. The application of interest is the use of self-reported contraceptive use to estimate contraceptive prevalence. She also considers accuracy of uncertainty assessments for populations with prevalence that is close to zero.
Jadey Wu
PhD Student Biostatistics
Jadey's research interests include Bayesian hierarchical models. She currently works on on the project to estimate of family planning indicators for low- and middle-income countries, disaggrated by geographic region and various demographic characteristics.
AASD (alumni active in statistical demography)
Monica Alexander
Assistant Professor, Statistics and Sociology, University of Toronto
Monica Alexander received a PhD in Demography and Masters in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods to help measure disparities in demographic and health outcomes. Her work in the Alkema lab focused on the estimation of neonatal mortality and subnational populations in both high- and low-income countries.
Niamh Cahill
Lecturer/Assistant Professor, Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics, Maynooth University
Niahm worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with the Alkema Lab Group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from January 2016 to December 2017. Her research topic was the statistical modeling of family planning indicators, focusing on the construction of estimates of contraceptive use and unmet need for contraceptives for all countries in the world. Her research mainly focused on further developing and updating the Family Planning Estimation Model (FPEM), which is a Bayesian model that is used annually by the Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) initiative to produce family planning estimates and to monitor progress towards improving access at national and subnational levels.
Fengqing Chao
Research Scientist, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Fengqing is a research scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Her research includes the development of Bayesian statistical models to estimate and project the sex ratio at birth and missing female births due to sex-selective abortions, as well as estimation of mortality disparities at young ages based on sex, economic status, and place of residence. Her research involves child mortality and sex ratio at birth.
Greg Guranich
Consultant for maternal mortality estimation, World Health Organization
Greg received a Master's in Biostatistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research in the Alkema lab involved the estimation and projection of family planning indicators using Bayesian hierarchical time series models. He was also a software engineer for the FPEM packages.
Barbara Mottley
PhD student, Environmental Health Sciences, UMass Amherst
Barbara received an MS in Biostatistics from UMass Amherst in 2021. Her research focused on spatial estimation of low birth weight in Ghana. Barbara graduated with a masters in Biostatistics from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her thesis focused on spatial analysis of birthweight in Ghana. For her PhD, she’s building models to assess the impact of air pollutants’ exposure on pregnant women and their offsprings after delivery. Along side, she will be using machine learning techniques to predict air and noise pollutant levels using google street view images in sub-Saharan African cities that lack data on urban environment and human-environment interface.
Emily Peterson
Research Assistant Professor in Biostatistics, Emory University
Emily received her PhD in Biostatistics in 2018. She developed a Bayesian hierarchical bivariate random walk model for misclassification errors in maternal mortality, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and worked on a project to model errors in sibling histories in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.