Biographical Sketches of Steering Committee Members and Presenters
MEMBERS
Barthélémy Kuate Defo (Chair) is a professor of demography and director of the Research Laboratory of the International Nutrition and Health Program of Canada at the University of Montreal. His research interests include population and global health, fertility and mortality linkages, sexuality and reproductive health, child nutrition, African demography, and demographic methods. He is currently the principal investigator on a large Rockefeller Foundation project examining the determinants and consequences of adolescent/youth sexuality and reproductive health in Cameroon. He is the author of Sexuality and Reproductive Health during Adolescence in Africa, with Special Reference to Cameroon. He has an M.S. in epidemiology and a Ph.D. in population studies from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Ayaga A. Bawah is principal research associate at the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health in Developing Countries (INDEPTH) in Accra, Ghana. His research interests are in the area of population and health in Africa, particularly infant and child mortality, health equity, reproductive health and methodological issues. He has particular expertise in the analysis of large-scale data including data from longitudinal surveys and national censuses. He has an M.A. in population studies from the United Nations Regional Institute at the University of Ghana and a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania.
Lisa F. Berkman is director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy, epidemiology and population, and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her work is oriented towards understanding social inequalities in health and aging related to socioeconomic status, labor policy, and social networks and social isolation. The majority of her work is devoted to identifying the role of social networks and support in predicting declines in physical and cognitive functioning and the onset of disease and mortality, especially related to cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine. She has a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, at Berkeley.
Alan D. Lopez is professor of medical statistics and population health and head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland, Australia. Previously, he worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva, where his technical and senior managerial posts included director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit and
senior science adviser to the director general. He also chairs the Health and Medical Research Council of Queensland and is a member of Australia’s Medical Services Advisory Committee. His principal research interests are analysis of mortality data burden of disease methods and applications and quantification of the health effects of tobacco, particularly in developing countries. He has published widely on mortality analysis and causes of death, including the impact of the global tobacco epidemic, and on the global descriptive epidemiology of major diseases, injuries, and risk factors. He is a foreign associate of the Institute of Medicine. He has an M.S. from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the Australian National University, Canberra.
Jane Menken is professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado. Prior to her current position, she was the UPS Foundation professor in the social sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also served as director of the Population Studies Center. Her main area of research is fertility. She has developed mathematical models of reproduction and analytic techniques and has carried out studies on female sterility, fertility determinants in Bangladesh, and teenage pregnancy and childbearing in the United States. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. She has served as a member of the board of directors of the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the advisory committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health. She has a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.S. in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Princeton University.
Julie Knoll Rajaratnam is assistant professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where she leads the mortality estimation methods work. Her work has included producing age-and sex-specific mortality estimates for more than 200 countries for the Global Burden of Disease 2005 project. She has also been worked on child injuries in Baltimore, social isolation and its effect on depressive symptoms in mothers with young children, measurement of neighborhood characteristics in the field of maternal/child health, the willingness to pay for an HIV/AIDS vaccine in Uganda, and school and neighborhood variation in youth violence in Baltimore. She has a B.A. in biology from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in public health from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Stephen Tollman is professor of community health in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He leads the Health and Population Division of the University’s School of Public Health and directs the Agincourt community demographic and health surveillance system. His work covers numerous aspects of population and health in Africa. He has a Ph.D. in epidemiology and public health from Umeå University, Sweden.
Stig Wall is professor of epidemiology and health care research at the University of Umeå, Sweden, where has served as director of its Centre for Global Health Research and founded its Division of Epidemiology and Public Health Services. His main research areas are epidemiology and international health, environmental and social epidemiology,
prevention and medical technology assessment. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health and is currently editor-in-chief of Global Health Action. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the INDEPTH Network. He was awarded the Nordic Public Health Prize by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Medal of Honor in Population Health from the Ministry of Health, Vietnam, and an honorary doctor of medicine by the University of Southern Denmark. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Umeå, Sweden.
PRESENTERS
Peter Byass is professor of global health at the Umeå University, Sweden, and director of the university’s Centre for Global Health Research. He also holds honorary professorships at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and works closely with the INDEPTH Network and the World Health Organization. He has worked on a wide range of population health measurement issues in Africa and Asia and has been deeply involved in the development of probabilistic models for interpreting verbal autopsy material, initiating the now widely used InterVA model. He serves as deputy editor of Global Health Action and is on the editorial boards of PLoS Medicine and Population Health Metrics. He has an M.Sc. in information science from Hatfield Polytechnic and a Ph.D. in public health from Nottingham University, both in England.
Mark Collinson is a senior researcher with the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt) of the School of Public Health at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the leader of the INDEPTH Network Working Group on Migration, Urbanization, and Health, and he has honorary research positions with the Centre for Global Health Research at Umeå University, Sweden, the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, and the Institute of Behavioral Studies at University of Colorado at Boulder. His research has focused on the nexus of migration, livelihoods, and health; on longitudinal statistical analysis in demography and public health; and on health and demographic surveillance systems. He has an M.Sc.(Med) from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in epidemiology and public health from the University of Umeå, Sweden.
Barthélémy Kuate Defo—see above.
Riku Elovainio is a technical officer with the Department of Health Systems Financing, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. His research interests include the role of health providers in low-and middle-income countries, performance incentives to influence health care provider behavior, strategic contracting in health systems, and health financing policy. He has studied anthropology, medical anthropology, economics and health economics at universities in Montpellier, Aix-en-Provence, and Clermont-Ferrand in France, and holds a master’s degree in Health Economics and Maîtrise in Anthropology.
Majid Ezzati holds the chair in global environmental health at Imperial College, London, and he is affiliate professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the effects of risk factor exposures and interventions on population health and health disparities, with emphasis on environmental risks, smoking, and nutritional and metabolic risk factors. His research group also conducts field research on air pollution and health in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. He is a member of several expert and advisory groups in global health and global environmental health. He has a master’s degree in engineering from McGill University and a Ph.D. in science, technology, and environmental policy from Princeton University.
Gilles Pison is director of research of the French National Institute for Demographic Research in Paris, where he is in charge of scientific communication; he is also professor at the French National Museum of Natural History. His research interests include aging and life expectancy, mortality and causes of death, the demography and health of twins, population projections (particularly for African countries), and the didactics of demography (multimedia, websites, exhibitions). He serves as editor-in-chief of Population and Societies.
Stephen Tollman—see above.
