I work as a professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University (OSU), and I am a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Population Research and the Translational Data Analytics Institute, both at OSU. I am affiliated with the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington and the School of Public Health  at the University of the Witwatersrand.

I work to improve: 1) verbal autopsy as a tool to measure the burden of disease, 2) mathematical models of human mortality, 3) indirect estimates of child mortality, and 4) small-area estimates of mortality. I also coordinate a small team developing open-source software to implement new methods - mostly for verbal autopsy and mathematical models of human mortality.

I lead the openVA Team that works to improve verbal autopsy. I have been a member of the WHO Verbal Autopsy Reference Group (VARG) since it was formed in 2013. Over the past several years I have been an active member of the VARG Task Group coordinating a comprehensive update of the WHO Standard Verbal Autopsy Instrument. The openVA Team develops and maintains tools that support the WHO standard.

I am also a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Health Statistics that is developing a global strategy on strengthening national mortality data systems to improve the availability, quality, and use of mortality data for public health action.