STA 290 Seminar: Shasha Jumbe (Gates Foundation)

Statistics Seminar Series

Tuesday, April 26th, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)

Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)

Speaker:          NLShasha’ Jumbe

(Senior Program Officer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

Title:                “Precision Public Health: Precision Targeting of Prevention and Therapeutic Interventions in vulnerable populations”

Abstract:          The disadvantaged majority – especially women and children in low- and middle-income countries – are uniquely exposed to potential Global Health threats because they are the least visible and most vulnerable to intentional or unintentional food-security perturbations, and persistent and emerging pandemic threats. It is estimated that 171 million infants and children under 60 months old per year are stunted, with 90% living in 39 lower income countries of Africa and Asia, and one country of the Americas, Guatemala. As more computing power and new statistical techniques become available, we have the ability to analyze data creatively to raise new questions and uncover novel insights that we didn’t know how to approach previously. We have curated and established a secure cloud-based repository, comprised of 124,770,924 children from 39 countries (~8,130,767 million children from clinical studies, including 1,765 clinical and demographic variables, median 62 variables/study) – a knowledge base unprecedented in size and depth (especially in global health). The inductive-learning method, being implemented to spearhead healthy birth, growth and development, advances the conversation from the theoretical (“data sharing is important”) to the practical (“this is why and how data sharing and new frontier science can happen”). Our goal is to identify targeted multifactorial intervention strategies for efficient field testing and validation.  If we are successful in evaluating secular health and disease patterns the same way that meteorologists study weather patterns, or air traffic controllers evaluate flight patterns, we could make the invisible visible, accelerate learning, and overcome persistent disease burden and predict health threats to minimize loss of well-being.

“Every person deserves the chance to live a healthy productive life”

Keywords:          data sharing, stunting, heterogeneity, variability, uncertainty, determinants, variance structure, knowledge integration, knowledge management, knowledge translation, precision medicine