Research

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study is the most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors across time, age, sex, and location. Conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, it produces systematic estimates for 204 countries and territories from 1990 to the present, enabling comparative assessments of disease burden and progress toward global health targets.

My contributions to GBD have centered on maternal and child health interventions, neonatal infectious diseases, and anemia epidemiology. I led analyses estimating the global prevalence and trends of anemia by severity and etiology alongside work on high-quality maternal and child health interventions and universal health coverage. My work has been published in journals such as The Lancet, The Lancet Haematology, and Nature Medicine.

The GBD consortium includes more than 9,000 collaborators across 162 countries and territories, and its data and results are publicly available through the Global Health Data Exchange.

The NHLBI Pooled Cohorts Study (PCS) is a large, US general population-based sample assembled by harmonizing data from nine NIH-funded prospective cohorts. It captures detailed information on respiratory and cardiovascular health outcomes — including spirometry-measured lung function, incident COPD, cardiovascular events, and mortality — alongside a broad array of risk factors, exposures, and sociodemographic determinants.

My work within the PCS has examined non-cigarette tobacco use and its effects on lung function decline and clinical outcomes. A study published in Thorax in 2026 estimated the association between pipe and cigar smoking and longitudinal lung function trajectories and clinical respiratory endpoints, adding to the limited evidence base for these historically understudied tobacco products.