Jonathan Wakefield, a professor of statistiscs and biostatistics at University of Washington, has been invited to join the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) that advises the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).
UN IGME was formed in 2004 to share data on child mortality, harmonize estimates within the UN system, improve methods for child mortality estimation, report on progress towards child survival goals, and enhance country capacity to produce timely and properly assessed estimates of child mortality (http://www.childmortality.org(link is external)). UN IGME is led by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and also includes as full members the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank Group and the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The TAG group comprises academic scholars and independent experts in demography and biostatistics and provides guidance to UN IGME on estimation methods, technical issues and strategies for data analysis and data quality assessment.
For the past three years Wakefield has been attending the semiannual meetings of UN IGME. During these meetings he has participated in discussions and presented substantive applied work and the methodological developments that he and his collaborators have made, particularly in the area of the estimation of under-5 mortality. These collaborators include Sam Clark, a former member of the Department of Sociology at UW now at OSU, graduate students Serge Aleshin-Guendel, Tracy Dong, Jessica Godwin, Yuan Hsiao, Richard Zehang Li, Laina Mercer, Bryan Martin, Aaron Osgood-Zimmerman, Johnny Paige and Katie Wilson, and Drs Gei-Arne Fuglstad and Andrea Riebler, both from NTNU in Trondheim and who spent sabbatical time in the Department of Statistics at UW during 2017-2018. Leontine Alkema, an alumni of the Department of Statistics is also on the TAG.
