Research

My research interests broadly fall into three areas:

Statistical demography: I develop methods to improve estimates and forecasts of demographic and health indicators in situations where the available data are sparse or unreliable. This work involves combining demographic and statistical methods to estimate outcomes in developing countries, minority populations, and in small geographic areas.

Health and mortality inequalities: I research how disparities in health and mortality outcomes are changing over time. Recent and current work involves studying the evolution of the opioid epidemic in the United States and Canada.

Using non-traditional data sources in demographic research: I focus on developing methods to overcome biases and data quality issues to take advantage of new data sources such as web and social media data, and text data.

A list of papers is also on Google Scholar.

Peer-reviewed publications

Book chapters

Working papers, projects, and pre-prints

Working papers where there is not so much working happening

Talks

Here are recordings of some talks:

Code and other fun projects

  • A package to fit Rogers-Castro migration models, rcbayes, is on CRAN.
  • I am a contributor to the DemoTools R package.
  • I made a children’s book in R called ’D is for Demography’. My toddler prefers ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ or ‘Wombat Stew’.
  • This repo on my GitHub has various bits and pieces of code, mostly related to mortality, but some other stuff too.
  • Shiny app to explore baby names in Australia, Ontario, and USA