Abraham Flaxman: "Computational Challenges in Disease Burden Measurement"

CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, October 14, 2015
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: 33 Oxford St., Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Abraham Flaxman (University of Washington)

Title: Computational Challenges in Disease Burden Measurement

Abstract: The Global Burden of Disease Study is a systematic effort to quantify the health loss due to disease, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, geography, and time. It contains estimates of years of life lost and years lived with disability due to hundreds of diseases, injuries and risk factors for 20 age groups, for two sexes, for 1990, 2005, and 2010, for 187 countries and regions. This constitutes million estimates in total.

This big data output resulted from big science input, a collaboration of 488 researchers from 50 countries and 303 institutions. In this talk, I will highlight some of the findings of the study, and also take you on a tour of the novel methods and data that are essential to this endeavor. It is now up to all of us to turn the data into information and, eventually, knowledge and evidence.

Biography: Abraham Flaxman is Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is the research lead for the Computational Algorithms research team. Dr Flaxman is the primary architect of a software tool known as DisMod-MR that IHME is using to estimate the Global Burden of Disease. He and other researchers use the tool to fill in gaps in incomplete data on stroke, malaria, depression, and other diseases from government records and surveys and to correct for inconsistencies.