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Category: Statistics Page 1 of 5

What does it take to be a successful PhD student? Two grad students in statistics weigh in

With so many different career options in life, how do you know that you’ve found the right one for you?

Graduate students Edric Tam and Andrew McCormack, when asked what they hope to be doing in ten years, said they’d choose to do exactly the kind of work they’re doing right now – so clearly, they’ve found the right path. Tam, who obtained his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience and Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, and McCormack, who came from the University of Toronto with a degree in Statistics, are now 5th-year PhD students in the Department of Statistical Sciences. Tam works with Professor David Dunson, while McCormack works with Professor Peter Hoff, and both hope to pursue research careers in statistics.

Edric Tam
Andrew McCormack

Research interests

For the past five years, McCormack has been doing more theoretical research, looking at how geometry can lend insights into statistical models. The example he gives is of the Fisher information matrix, a statistical model that many undergraduate statistics majors learn in their third or fourth year.

Tam, meanwhile, looks at data with unique graphical and connectivity structures that aren’t quite linear or easily modeled, such as a brain connectome or a social network. In doing so, he works on answering two questions – how can you model data like this, and how can you leverage the unique structure of the data in the process?

What both Tam and McCormack like about the field of statistics is that, as Tam puts it, “you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” Moreover, as McCormack says, the beauty of theoretical research is that, while it’s certainly more time-consuming and incremental, it is often timeless, giving insight into something previously unknown.

On walking the research path

What does it take to be a successful PhD student? Both McCormack and Tam agree that a PhD is just a degree – anyone can get one if you work hard. But what sustains both through a career in research is a passion for what they do. Tam says that “you need inherent motivation, curiosity, passion, and drive.” McCormack adds that it helps if you work on problems that are interesting to you. 

Tam, who spent some time in a biomedical engineering lab during his undergraduate years, remembers reading about math and statistics the entire time he was there, which signaled to him that maybe, biomedical engineering wasn’t for him. McCormack’s defining moment occurred in the proof-based classes he took while as an undergraduate. He initially wanted to pursue a career in finance, but he quickly became enamored by the elegant precision of mathematical proofs – “even if all you’re proving is that 1+1=2!”

“You need inherent motivation, curiosity, passion, and drive.”

Edric tam, on what it takes to pursue a career in research

Even with passion for what you do, however, research can have its ups and downs. McCormack describes the rollercoaster of coming up with a new idea, convinced that “this is a paper right here”, and then a day later, after he’s had time to think about the idea, realizing that it isn’t quite up to the mark. Tam, who considers himself a pretty laidback person, sometimes finds the Type A personalities in research, as in any career field, too intense. Both McCormack and Tam prefer to not take themselves too seriously, and both exude a love for – and a trust of – the process.

Tam, not taking himself too seriously

Reflections on the past and the future

Upon graduation, McCormack will move to Germany to pursue a post-doc before beginning a job as Assistant Professor in Statistics at the University of Alberta. Tam will continue his research at Duke before applying to post-doc programs. In reflecting on their paths that have brought them till now, both feel content with the journey they’ve taken.

Tam sees the future in front of him – from PhD to post-doc to professorship – as “just a change in the title, with more responsibility”, and is excited to embark on his post-doc, where he gets to continue to do the research he loves. “It doesn’t get much better than this,” he laughs, and McCormack agrees. When McCormack joins the faculty at the University of Alberta, he’s looking forward to mentoring students in a much larger capacity, although he comments that the job will probably be challenging and he’s expecting to feel a little bit of imposter syndrome as he settles in.

When asked for parting thoughts, both Tam and McCormack emphasize that the best time to get into statistics and machine learning is right now. The advent of ChatGPT, for example, could replace jobs and transform education. But given their love for the field, this recommendation isn’t surprising. As Tam succinctly puts it, “given a choice between doing math and going out with friends, I would do math –  unless that friend is Andy!”

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023

Senior Jenny Huang on her Love for Statistics and the Scientific Endeavor

Statistics and computer science double major Jenny Huang (T’23) started Duke as many of us do – vaguely pre-med, undecided on a major – but she knew she had an interest in scientific research. Four years later, with a Quad Fellowship and an acceptance to MIT for her doctoral studies, she reflects on how research shaped her time at Duke, and how she hopes to impact research.

Jenny Huang (T’23)

What is it about statistics? And what is it about research?

With experience in biology research during high school and during her first year at Duke, Huang toyed with the idea of an MD/PhD, but ultimately realized that she might be better off dropping the MD. “I enjoy figuring out how the world works” Huang says, and statistics provided a language to examine the probabilistic and often unintuitive nature of the world around us.

In another life, Huang remarked, she might have been a physics and philosophy double major, because physics offers the most fundamental understanding of how the world works, and philosophy is similar to scientific research: in both, “you pursue the truth through cyclic questioning and logic.” She’s also drawn to engineering, because it’s the process of dissecting things until you can “build them back up from first principles.”

At the International Society for Bayesian Analysis summer conference in Montreal

Huang’s research and the impact of COVID-19

For Huang, research started her first year at Duke, on a Data+ team, led by Professor Charles Nunn, studying the variation of parasite richness across primate species. To map out what types of parasites interacted with what type of monkeys, the team relied on predictors such as body mass, diet, and social activity, but in the process, they came up against an interesting phenomenon.

It appeared that the more studied a primate was, the more interactions it would have with parasites, simply because of the amount of information available on the primate. Due to geographic and experimental constraints, however, a large portion of the primate-parasite network remained understudied. This example of a concept in statistics known as sampling bias was muddling their results. One day, while making an offhand remark about the problem to one of her professors (Professor David Dunson), Huang ended up arranging a serendipitous research match. It turned out that Dunson had a statistical model that could be applied to the problem Nunn and the Data+ team were facing.

The applicability of statistics to a variety of different fields enamored Huang. When COVID-19 hit, it impacted all of us to some degree, but for Huang, it provided the perfect opportunity to apply mathematical models to a rapidly-changing pandemic. For the past two summers, through work with Dunson on a DOMath project, as well as Professor Jason Xu and Professor Rick Durrett, Huang has used mathematical modeling to assess changes in the spread of COVID-19.

On inclusivity in research

As of 2018, just 28% of graduates in mathematics and statistics at the doctoral level identified as women. Huang will eventually be included in this percentage, seeing as she begins her Ph.D. at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the fall, working with Professor Tamara Broderick.

“When I was younger, I always thought that successful and smart people in academia were white men,” Huang laughed. But that’s not true, she emphasizes: “it’s just that we don’t have other people in the story.” As one of the few female-presenting people in her research meetings, Huang has often felt pressure to underplay her more, “girly” traits to fit in. But interacting with intelligent, accomplished female-identifying academics in the field (including collaborations with Professor Cynthia Rudin) reaffirms to her that it’s important to be yourself: “there’s a place for everyone in research.”

At the Joint Statistical Meetings Conference in D.C with fellow researcher Gaurav Parikh

Advice for first-years and what the future holds

While she can’t predict where exactly she’ll end up, Huang is interested in taking a proactive role in shaping the impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning on society. And as the divide between academia and industry is becoming more and more gray, years from now, she sees herself existing somewhere in that space.

Her advice for incoming Duke students and aspiring researchers is threefold. First, Huang emphasizes the importance of mentorship. Having kind and validating mentors throughout her time at Duke made difficult problems in statistics so much more approachable for her, and in research, “we need more of that type of person!”

Second, she says that “when I first approached studying math, my impatience often got in the way of learning.” Slowing down with the material and allowing herself the time to learn things thoroughly helped her improve her academic abilities.

Being around people who have this shared love and a deep commitment for their work is just the human endeavor at its best.

Jenny huang

Lastly, she stresses the importance of collaboration. Sometimes, Huang remarked,“research can feel isolating, when really it is very community-driven.” When faced with a tough problem, there is nothing more rewarding than figuring it out together with the help of peers and professors.  And she is routinely inspired by the people she does research with: “being around people who have this shared love and a deep commitment for their work is just the human endeavor at its best.”

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023

(Editor’s note: This is Jenny’s second appearance on the blog. As a senior at NC School of Science and Math, she wrote a post about biochemist Meta Kuehn.)

The Need for Title IX in STEM

The Panel:

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, which was intended to make sex discrimination in education illegal, a panel of Duke women met on Thursday, September 29 to talk about whether Title IX could change STEM, (Science Technology, Engineering and Math). Unfortunately, the answer was not simple.

But just through the sharing of the statistics relevant to this problem, the stories, and their solutions, one could start to understand the depth of this problem. One takeaway was that all women in STEM, whether they be student, professor, or director, have faced gender discrimination.

The student panelists after a successful forum

Down to the Statistics:

Dr. Sherryl Broverman, a Duke professor of the practice in biology and global health, gave the audience an overview. Of all of Duke’s regular ranked, tenured-track faculty, only 30% are women. In contrast, women make up 60% of the non-tenure track faculty. Dr. Broverman said men are promoted in Duke at a higher frequency. This is especially seen with the associate professor title because, on average, men are associate professors for 4 to 5 years; whereas women are associate professors for up to 9 years.

To give an example, senior Nasya Bernard-Lucien, a student panelist who studied Biomedical Engineering and then Neuroscience informed me that she has had a total of two women professors in her entire STEM career. This is a common pattern here at Duke because taking a STEM class that has a woman professor is as rare as finding a non-stressed Duke student.

Dr. Kisha Daniels (left) and Dr. Whitney McCoy (right)

The Beginning of a Girl’s Career in STEM

This disproportionate demographic of women professors in STEM is not a new occurrence with Duke or the rest of the world because the disproportion of women in STEM can be seen as early as middle school. Two of the student panelists noted that during their middle school career, they were not chosen to join an honors STEM program and had to push their school’s administration when they asked to take more advanced STEM classes.

Dr. Kisha Daniels, an associate professor of the practice in education said on a faculty panel that one of her daughters was asked by her male peers, “what are you doing here?” when she attended her middle school’s honors math class. Gender discrimination in STEM begins in early childhood, and it extends its reach as long as women continue to be in a STEM field, and that is particularly evident here at Duke.

Women in STEM at Duke

Dr. Sherryl Broverman

The last panel of the Title IX @ 50 event was the student panel which consisted of undergraduate and graduate students. Even though they were all from different backgrounds, all acknowledged the gender disparity within STEM classes.

Student Bentley Choi said she was introduced to this experience of gender discrimination when she first arrived at Duke from South Korea. She noted how she was uncomfortable and how it was hard to ask for help while being one of the few women in her physics class. One would have hoped that Duke would provide a more welcoming environment to her, but that is not the case, and it is also not an isolated incident. Across the panel, all of the women have experienced discomfort in their STEM classes due to being one of the few girls in there.

The Future of Title IX

How can Title IX change these issues? Right now, Title IX and STEM are not as connected as they need to be; in fact, Title IX, in the past, has been used to attack programs created to remedy the gender disparity in STEM. So, before Title IX can change STEM, it needs to change itself.

Title IX needs to address that this problem is a systemic issue and not a standalone occurrence. However, for this change to happen, Dr. Whitney McCoy, a research scientist in Child and Family Policy, said it perfectly, “we need people of all backgrounds to voice the same opinion to create policy change.”

So, talk to your peers about this issue because the more people who understand this situation, the chances of creating a change increases. The last thing that needs to occur is that 50 years in the future, there will be similar panels like this one that talk about this very issue, and there are no panels that talk about how we, in the present, fixed it.

Post by Jakaiyah Franklin, Class of 2025

What Happens When You Give People Money?

What happens when you give people money? Dr. Aisha Nyandoro and Natalie Foster know: through their research, they’ve seen the impacts of guaranteed income firsthand.

On November 9, as part of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy’s Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture series, these experts discussed their work and what we can learn from it at “What Happens When You Give People Money: The Future of Economic Security for Children and Families.”

Natalie Foster

Foster, co-founder and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, began with the big idea of guaranteed income. Before the pandemic, wealth and income inequality were at all-time highs — disparities that “can be traced back to the origins of racialized capitalism.” But recently, things have gotten even harder. Wages have remained stagnant despite increases in productivity — and despite inflation, making it harder to afford things like rent. Foster denounced the “strong ideology that says that lack of security in this system is a personal failing. That if you can’t pull yourself up, there’s something wrong with you.” There’s something wrong with the system, Foster said. “People are working. The economy isn’t.”

Foster explained that the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” fundamentally changed welfare by converting the old New Deal-era unlimited grant program into the flat-funded block grant we now know as TANF, leaving determination of eligibility to state discretion and generally “making welfare more punitive.” The Act, Foster said, was built on racist stereotypes, like that of the welfare queen. To make matters worse, it was passed against the backdrop of a persistent devaluation of the labor of people of color

Foster said that even though there didn’t appear to be room in these political conditions to do things differently, she had the “audacity to imagine something else: the ‘adjacent possible.’” She wanted to give cash to people directly, ensuring an income floor regardless of whatever crises that may abound.

Foster worked with the mayor of Stockton, California on the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), which provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years. 

Dr. Aisha Nyandoro

Foster was connected by a mutual friend to Nyandoro, the CEO of Springboard to Opportunities. Nyandoro had launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which provides low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi with $1,000 monthly payments for one year. 

With The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, Nyandoro sought to shift away from economic policy “rooted in ‘what is,’ and toward ‘what could be.’” This concept has a rich history, she said, and includes the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers. She had a specific ‘what if’ in mind: “What if when Black women told us what they needed, we believed them?” What if we sought to overturn the very structures that keep these people down, and subverted the “paternalistic nature of the social safety net”? 

Nyandoro stated that as a researcher, when she has questions, she “goes back to the people.” When she did, she found that although people’s needs were individual, “cash was ubiquitous” — cash was a solution that could address every single one of the problems that she heard. Giving cash directly could help combat a system that “penalizes people for being poor, rather than trying to lift them out of poverty.” 

Why low-income Black mothers? Nyandoro explained that in order to do the work of economic liberation, one must identify what’s wrong with the system. In this case, that meant identifying those who are the most negatively impacted by the system, and using what limited resources are available to help them specifically.

Nyandoro turned to her findings: giving people cash works. These mothers are often working tirelessly, holding down two or three jobs and struggling to make ends meet. After receiving the money, people continue to work and often do so at higher rates (a major fear of opponents of guaranteed income). As a result, their income is often doubled — with life-changing results

Beyond the numbers, Nyandoro emphasized that “we are seeing joy. We don’t talk about joy enough as it relates to Black women.” This money allowed Black women to feel free, to be entrepreneurial: to “dare to dream for the first time — for themselves and for their families.” 

She referenced Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous speech “The Danger of a Single Story,” explaining that in order to change the narrative, “we need to change the narrator.” It’s time to think about whose voices we center.

In Jackson, Mississippi and Stockton, California, the pair had carried out research about the ‘adjacent possible.’ They’d used cities and states as “laboratories in democracy.” Foster said that their work was paving the way for gradual advances in guaranteed income — slowly, but surely. Then, the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, ideas that had recently been dismissed as too radical were viewed as necessary. Often unable to work, people needed money fast in order to put food on the table and cover their most urgent needs. The federal government rose to the challenge with the American Rescue Plan, providing stimulus checks and pandemic unemployment insurance, plus expanding the Child Tax Credit. “The ‘adjacent possible’”, Foster said, “had become the possible.”

The country saw an “immediate drop in poverty.” The pandemic was revealing, said Foster. It revealed that cash provides time, stress reduction, and resilience. It revealed that cash serves as a tool to create economic security and “build back better.” Above all, it revealed that “poverty is a policy choice that we’re currently making. We could make a different policy choice in order to eliminate it.”

The pandemic also revealed that stimulus checks and the Child Tax Credit were “very popular policies.” Nyandoro has observed support in the form of petitions for monthly cash transfers, the founding of organizations like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and Guaranteed Income Community of Practice, and the launch of over a hundred guaranteed income pilots of some sort. All these efforts, Nyandoro said, are pushing toward “the same North Star”: centering the needs of families and achieving economic liberation through federal policy.

Foster turned the discussion toward next steps: “these victories have been immense, but could disappear” if the Build Back Better Act does not pass. The Act includes a year-long extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit, a key instantiation of guaranteed income. The Child Tax Credit has bipartisan support

If the extension of the Child Tax Credit passes, then according to Foster, guaranteed income is one step closer to becoming a cornerstone of social policy. This would be a “nail in the coffin of the way we’ve done policy for the last fifty years — that you’re only worth what you do in the world. Every human has dignity and worth, and we have the opportunity to build a policy that says just that.” 

Nyandoro agreed with Foster. As an anti-poverty advocate, she believes in a world without poverty: a world where “everyone can have a life of dignity for themselves and their families.” She believes that the ‘adjacent possible’ is achievable if “we can move beyond our own individual needs in order to view life as a collective, where prosperity is shared rather than hoarded.” She ended by quoting Toni Morrison: “if you have some power, then your job is to empower someone else.”

Last Friday, the House voted to pass the Build Back Better Act, which now heads to the Senate.

Post by Zella Hanson

“News for the Rich, White, and Blue”: Nikki Usher on her new book and the state of American journalism

Erik Carter

News organizations are facing an economic crisis

In their battle for survival, they are “realigning their priorities in ways that favor audiences who are willing to pay.” And those who are willing to pay tend to be rich, white, and politically blue.

On November 3, as part of the DeWitt Wallace Center’s Fall 2021 Information Inequalities Speaker Series, author and University of Illinois associate professor Nikki Usher discussed her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.

Usher began by explaining that as newspapers face “market failure,” only non-geographical news is in a position to survive. As news becomes a private good (The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times come to mind), the result is inconsistent and unequal access to news. 

According to Usher, 1800 local communities lack any regular access to local news. Usher stated that political consequences result when news organizations pull back from places that don’t exhibit that aforementioned willingness to pay. 

She gave an example of one such consequence: many journalists had their “heads in the sand” about the rising tides of populism in rural America. As a result, they were blindsided when Trump won the election. But the win simply revealed what had been the case all along. 

The New York Times editor Dean Baquet acknowledged this after the election: “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country… and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

Usher said that another consequence of the delocalization of news is reduced trust: only 11% of Republicans say they trust the media a great deal or a fair amount. Additionally, when places lose news, they grow more polarized, with reductions in split-ticket voting. 

Usher said that she practices a kind of “gestalt scholarship,” employing the tools of ethnography and lived experience as well as quantitative data. She dipped into this side of her research, recounting a few anecdotes which represent the “materiality” of the loss of local news.

In 2018, the LA Times moved from its Downtown home, near Skid Row, to El Segundo. The move was not without controversy. In a 2018 editorial, an anonymous author wrote that “location matters, on both a physical and symbolic level, and… moving the headquarters far away from the local power base and the most important entities and stories the Times covers… is the wrong choice.” 

The Miami Herald’s old home got demolished in 2015. Now the newsroom is near the airport, across from a cow pasture. “It’s bad for the psyche for there to be no building to exist for people to see every day,” said an editor. (A recent bit of unnerving news regarding the future of the Herald and journalism at large.)

Usher then stated that newsrooms are “places of power” that are becoming “increasingly inhospitable places for those who are non-white and who lack financial resources.” 

In June 2020, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor resigned after the publication of an article with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” led to a walkout by dozens of staff members. At the LA Times, Latinx journalists penned an open letter drawing attention to the fact that its 13% Latinx newsroom does not reflect its nearly 50% Latinx community. In Detroit, the disparity is even worse: an 80% Black population is served by a newsroom that is only 14% Black. 

In 1968, the Kerner Commission put down a series of recommendations to improve diversity, noting that the journalistic profession was “shockingly backward” in its absence of Black journalists. The American Society of News Editors set a target date for newsrooms to be at parity with the populations they represented: 2000. They’ve since pushed the deadline to 2025. 

It’s not looking good. That’s because, according to Usher, newsrooms aren’t hiring, and “when newsrooms don’t hire, they don’t hire minority journalists.”

Usher also touched on the “death of the working class reporter.” Increasingly, the only young people who are not deterred by journalism’s instability and lack of lucrativity are those who come from copious amounts of privilege. Add this to the inability of poorer students to pursue resume-building journalism activities alongside work-study jobs, and the preference of news outlets for the oft-wealthy students of elite universities, and one can see why “journalism is becoming a profession for the elite.” 

Usher said that when “newsrooms become bastions of privilege, [that’s] bad news.” Losing journalists who come from blue-collar backgrounds means losing the ability to “empathize” with a whole set of experiences.

Usher said that as news revenue goes increasingly digital, reliance on those willing to pay is even more pronounced, with “consequences for equity in access and geographically specific news coverage.” She referenced The New York Times, whose rise “mirrors the rise in inequality” of access to news. “They know they’re leaving people behind,” Usher said. She quoted Dean Baquet, who acknowledged that 98% of Americans “were now excluded from The New York Times’ journalism and might well have to do with substandard information.”

Usher also discussed “Goldilock newspapers” — not too big, not too small, but just right for survival according to the “upside-down logic” of digital advertising. The problem is that, as Mike Wilson of the Dallas Morning News put it, “the pursuit of digital subscriptions has honed our focus on what we’re covering” — sometimes to the detriment of local readers. As a result of this phenomenon, Usher has seen reduced coverage in places considered too low-income to get advertisers. In one instance, she saw a dismissal of concerns about ad- and malware clunking up the computers of those with inferior Internet access because “those people are less likely to subscribe anyway.” 

Where does this leave us? Usher identified a few potential solutions. She reiterated calls for more inclusive newsrooms, and added her own call for higher-ed financial aid reform so that lower-income students can have a fighting chance at pursuing journalism. She discussed the need for a “post newspaper consciousness” — to acknowledge that we cannot save the newspaper, but we can identify what journalism does best and save those “special parts.” 

She left the audience with a final recommendation: journalism should “embrace the partisan media system.” Usher clarified her position: the news media like The New York Times “hides behind a veil of neutrality,” when this is only an (unconvincing) illusion. “People want to see them advocate for social justice,” she said, and she agrees. Usher doesn’t think polarization is inherently bad “if it’s polarization toward social justice and breaking down systemic inequality.”

“There’s no use assuaging people who have given up and aren’t listening. And then you have lots of people unsubscribing because the phony neutrality was irritating them,” Usher said. For organizations like the Times, the veil of neutrality is looking like a lose-lose.

She advised them to “go for those who are still listening. And just own it.”

Post by Zella Hanson

The COVID-19 ‘Endgame’ Depends on Where You Live

In February of 2020, no one could have fathomed that the very next month would usher in the COVID-19 pandemic – an era of global history that has (to date) resulted in 5 million deaths, 240 million cases, trillions of dollars lost, and the worsening of every inequality imaginable.

And while scientists and governments have worked together to make incredible advances in vaccine technology, access, and distribution, it goes without saying that there is more work to be done to finally put the pieces of an exhausted global society back together. On Tuesday, October 12th, the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) brought together three leaders in global health to discuss what those next steps should be.

The panel discussion, which was moderated by Dr. Krishna Udayakumar of the DGHI, was titled “The COVID-19 Endgame: Where are we headed, and when will we get there?” The panelists were Dr. Ann Lindstrand, who is the World Health Organization’s unit head for the Essential Program on Immunization; Dr. Ayoade Alakija, who is the co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance and founder of the Emergency Coordination Center in Nigeria; and Alberto Valenzuela, who is the Executive Director of the Pan American and Parapan American Games Legacy Project.

Dr. Ayoade Alakija
Dr. Ann Linstrand
Alberto Valenzuela

Dr. Lindstrand began by setting the stage and highlighting what are undoubted successes on a global level. 6.5 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered around the world, and the vaccines have impressive effectiveness given the speed with which they were developed. Yet undergirding all of this is the elephant in the room that, sitting in a 1st-world country, we don’t think about: high-income countries have administered 32 times more doses per inhabitant compared to low-income countries.

Graph from Dr. Ann Lindstrand

This vaccine inequity has been exacerbated by already weak health security systems, vaccine nationalism, and lackluster political commitment. And while the WHO is slated to enormously ramp up supplies of vaccines in Q4 of 2021 and Q1 of 2022, it doesn’t mitigate the damage to the socioeconomic welfare of people that COVID-19 has already had. Dr. Lindstrand outlines the three waves of socioeconomic impact we will see, but expressed concern that “we’re already beginning to see the first wave pan out.” 

Diagram from Dr. Ann Lindstrand

Dr. Alakija took this discussion a step further, asserting that COVID-19 is poised to become the disease of low-income countries. “If you’re living in the US or EU,” she remarked, “You’re heading into the ‘Roaring 20s’. If you live in the Global South, COVID-19 is going to become your future.”

To this point, Dr. Alakija emphasized that the only reason this is the status quo is because in her eyes, the world failed to do what was right when it should have. In her home country of Nigeria, she highlighted that out of a population of 210 million people, 5.1 million people have received the vaccine – and of those 5.1 million, just 2 million — one percent — have been double-vaccinated. “It really is a case of keeping those down further down, while giving booster doses to those that have already been vaccinated,” she said. “We don’t have diagnostic data, so people are slipping underwater and the world has no idea.”

It’s worth noting that Nigeria houses some of the megacities of the world, not just in the African continent. So according to Dr. Alakija, “we don’t solve this with a medical lens, we solve this with a whole-of-society lens.” We must, she argued, because in an interconnected world, no one exists in isolation.

Alberto Valenzuela’s work is a great example of this. In 2019, his team led organizing efforts for the Pan American Games in Lima, relying on extensive partnerships between public organizations and corporations. In 2020, though, as the world shifted, the government called on the team to transition into something much different – COVID-19 relief efforts in the country.

The results are staggering. In just 5 weeks, the Pan American and Parapan American Games Legacy Project built 10 hospitals in 5 regions of the country. The implementation of 31 vaccination centers throughout the country resulted in a tripling of the number of people vaccinated per day in Lima. To him, this work “proves what’s possible when private and public sectors merge.” In other words, remarkable things happen when all of society tackles a societal issue.

Slide from Alberto Valenzuela

So where do we go from here? Perhaps the biggest thing that stood out was the need to empower low-income countries to make decisions that are best for them. In Dr. Alakija’s words, “we need to lose the charity model in favor of a partnership model.” Dr. Lindstrand pointed out that there’s a deep know-how in the Global South of how to roll out mass-vaccination efforts – but only when we “lay down our organizational hats” can we move to what Dr. Lindstrand termed “more coordination and less confusion.” Valenzuela emphasized the need to integrate many sectors, not just healthcare, to mobilize the COVID-19 response in countries. But above all, Dr. Alakija said, “there will be no endgame until we have equity, inclusion, and health justice.” 

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023

The Black Wealth Gap in Modern Day America

“White Americans have been provided with up escalators they can ride to reach their goals without hurdles. Meanwhile, Black Americans have been forced onto down escalators which they must run-up to reach their destination.”

The Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University recently released a striking report on Black wealth in America, entitled “Still Running Up the Down Escalator: How Narratives Shape our Understanding of Racial Wealth Inequality,” This 36-page report, written by Natasha Hicks, Fenaba Addo, Anne Prince, and William Darity examines the stark inequalities in the economic situation of Black Americans.

The cover page of the 36-page, in-depth report, published earlier this fall.

“Despite a decade of philanthropic investment and renewed attention from progressive elected officials, policymakers, and advocates, we have yet to make discernible progress in ensuring Black families have the power and freedom wealth bestows,” the report says (page 1).

“The typical Black household’s wealth (in 2019) was $24,100; for White households, it was $188,200. This translates into the typical Black household holding about 12 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the typical White family– a disparity that has remained largely unchanged since 1989 (Kent and Ricketts, 2020).” ( page 6)

Black families are disproportionately shut out of access to opportunities that would improve generational wealth, such as home loans, business loans/ownership, and financial assets. Because of the long history of these inequalities, Black wealth in America has improved little in the last 10 years.

The report continues by analyzing how Covid-19, the worst Pandemic in US History, has widened the wealth gap in America.

“Racial wealth inequality remains a persistent defining American issue, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate toll on the physical and financial health of Black people,” the report says. “The COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding economic crisis have only exacerbated what was already a collective failing by policymakers and elected officials, who continue to invest in solutions focused on individual behavior instead of systems change.”

Covid-19 placed over 114 million people into unemployment over the course of the pandemic, with an overrepresentation of Black Americans in these figures. The figures below were published in the report to highlight the number of liquid assets and wealth available to white families versus black families in 2019, just one year before the pandemic.

This figure taken from the report shows the median liquid assets by race and income. ( figure 1, page 8)
This figure taken from the report shows the median wealth accumulated by race and wealth quintiles. (figure 2, page 8)

As illustrated by these figures, the average White family in America maintains a leg up financially through both income and assets, which is why when the pandemic hit, black Americans were the ones disproportionately affected. Without access to high wealth modules or liquid assets to lean on, the economic wealth gap in America grew bigger.

The next part of the report talked about how false narratives in America regarding economic inequality is leading to unsuccessful aims of correction. In America, it’s a common theme to assume the problems faced by Black Americans are a cultural or personal issue, instead of a systemic one.

“Harmful narratives that characterize Black Americans as unintelligent, lazy, and criminal reinforce the notion that racial wealth disparities between Black and White households arise from differences in culture, values, skills, and behavior.” (page 10) Themes of anti-Blackness and personal responsibility, or a bootstrap mentality, were key systemic factors noted in the report. These factors impacted almost every aspect of Black America, including education, homeownership, entrepreneurship, family structure, and income and employment.

The report concludes by bringing up tangible solutions for these structural problems.

“The past year of crises is exposing the fact that we created systems, rules, and policies that actively and intentionally harm Black people. In order to truly address racial wealth inequality and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, policymakers and funders must move away from solutions focused on behavioral changes and individual choices. Rather, they must take bold actions (backed by large scale financial investments) to shift dominant narratives and reimagine economic structures that support, uplift and protect Black people.” (page 23)

The authors make four broad proposals: shift harmful narratives, eliminate the racial wealth gap, dismantle extractive policies, and design programs to seed intergenerational wealth.

Economic disparities in America are a systemic issue, not a cultural or personal one. This report examines the interplay between this issue and the current pandemic, maintaining that the only way to create tangible change is through systemic solutions.

“America offers a false promise of equal opportunity and individual agency. For Black Americans, making all the right choices does not equal all the right outcomes. Just as wealth-building for White people in America was by design and government action, we need intentional and structural wealth-building strategies for Black Americans with investments compared to those given to White Americans. This requires a paradigm shift to truly tackle racial wealth inequality.” (page 36)

Written by Skylar Hughes, Class of 2025

New Blogger Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi: Arts and Artificial Intelligence

Hi! My name is Shariar. My friends usually pronounce that as Shaw-Ree-Awr, and my parents pronounce it as a Share-Ee-Awr, but feel free to mentally process my name as “Sher-Rye-Eer,” “Shor-yor-ior-ior-ior-ior,” or whatever phonetic concoction your heart desires. I always tell people that there’s no right way to interpret language, especially if you’re an AI (which you might be).

Speaking of AI, I’m excited to study statistics and mathematics at Duke! This dream was born out of my high school research internship with New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger, through which I immersed myself in the applications of machine learning to the social sciences. Since Dr. Berger and I completed our ML-guided study of the social psychology of communicative language, I’ve injected statistical learning techniques into my investigations of political science, finance, and even fantasy football.

Unwinding in the orchestra room after a performance

When I’m not cramped behind a Jupyter Notebook or re-reading a particularly long research abstract for the fourth time, I’m often pursuing a completely different interest: the creative arts. I’m an orchestral clarinetist and quasi-jazz pianist by training, but my proudest artistic endeavours have involved cinema. During high school, I wrote and directed three short films, including a post-apocalyptic dystopian comedy and a silent rendition of the epic poem “Epopeya de la Gitana.”

I often get asked whether there’s any bridge between machine learning and the creative arts*, to which the answer is yes! In fact, as part of my entry project for Duke-based developer team Apollo Endeavours, I created a statistical language model that writes original poetry. Wandering
Mind, as I call the system, is just one example of the many ways that artificial intelligence can do what we once considered exclusively-human tasks. The program isn’t quite as talented as Frost or Dickinson, but it’s much better at writing poetry than I am.

In a movie production (I’m the one wearing a Totoro onesie)

I look forward to presenting invigorating research topics to blog readers for the next year or more. Though machine learning is my scientific expertise, my investigations could transcend all boundaries of discipline, so you may see me passionately explaining biology experiments, environmental studies, or even macroeconomic forecasts. Go Blue Devils!

(* In truth, I almost never get asked this question by real people unless I say, “You know, there’s actually a connection between machine learning and arts.”)

By Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi, Class of 2025

Child Protective Services Do Work, But They Are Unevenly Distributed

Roughly one in seven  New York City children suffer confirmed mistreatment at home and many are placed in foster care. But relatively few children are permanently separated from their parents by the termination of parental rights, according to new research from Duke University and Rutgers University-Newark.

The data points to a relative success story in the world of child welfare, said Chris Wildeman, a Duke University sociologist and co-author of the research. In New York City, child welfare specialists intervene often in abuse and neglect cases but are often able to avoid terminating parental rights, even when they do remove the child from the home, Wildeman added.

Wildeman’s co-authors are Kieran Healy, a Duke sociologist, and Frank Edwards and Sara Wakefield from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University – Newark.

In New York City, roughly two in five children will be involved in an investigation by their local child protective services office; one in seven will experience confirmed maltreatment, one in 35 will be placed in foster care. (Dallas Clemons)

“I think the core takeaway there is that New York is the prime example of taking maltreatment seriously and intervening as a system,” Wildeman said. “But also taking seriously the idea that permanent termination of parental rights totally closes off any chance for family reunification, so only doing it in the most extreme circumstances.”

The peer-reviewed study, appearing the week of July 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, derives from an analysis of child welfare data from the nation’s 20 most populous counties. (The New York data is from all five boroughs because the entire city’s child welfare system is under a single governing umbrella)

The study looked at how often children were the subject of a child services investigation; suffered confirmed mistreatment, were placed in foster care, and removed permanently from their homes through the termination of parental rights.

Nationally, roughly one in three children will be involved in an investigation by their local child protective services office; one in eight will experience maltreatment, one in 17 will be placed in foster care and one in 100 will have parental rights terminated, according to the study.

In New York City, roughly two in five children will be involved in an investigation by their local child protective services office; one in seven will experience confirmed maltreatment, one in 35 will be placed in foster care and one in 600 will have parental rights terminated, according to the study.

Nationally, one in 100 parents will have their rights terminated, while in New York that figure is one in 600. (Dallas Clemons)

“The system is functioning more the way many child welfare advocates would like it to function,” Wildeman said. “Make sure you identify maltreatment, but attempt to use services rather than foster care treatment, at least initially, and then only terminating parental rights in only the most extreme circumstances. And trying to be aware of racial disparities in those processes.”

CITATION:  “Contact with Child Protective Services is Pervasive but Unequally Distributed by Race and Ethnicity in Large US Counties,” PNAS, July 19, 2021. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2106272118

Post by Eric Ferreri , Duke University Communications

Increasing Access to Care with the Help of Big Data

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science have the potential to revolutionize global health. But what exactly is AI and what hurdles stand in the way of more widespread integration of big data in global health? Duke’s Global Health Institute (DGHI) hosted a Think Global webinar Wednesday, February 17th to dive into these questions and more.  

The webinar’s panelists were Andy Tatem (Ph.D), Joao Vissoci (Ph.D.), and Eric Laber (Ph.D.), moderated by DGHI’s Director of Research Design and Analysis Core, Liz Turner (Ph.D.).  Tatem is a professor of spatial demography and epidemiology at the University of South Hampton and director of WorldPop. Vissoci is an assistant professor of surgery and global health at Duke University. Laber is a professor of statistical science and bioinformatics at Duke.

Panelist moderator, Lisa Turner

Tatem, Vissoci, and Laber all use data science to address issues in the global health realm. Tatem’s work largely utilizes geospatial data sets to help inform global health decisions like vaccine distribution within a certain geographic area. Vissoci, who works with the GEMINI Lab at Duke (Global Emergency Medicine Innovation and Implementation Research), tries to leverage secondary data from health systems in order to understand issues of access to and distribution of care, as well as care delivery. Laber is interested in improving decision-making processes in healthcare spaces, attempting to help health professionals synthesize very complex data via AI.

All of their work is vital to modern biomedicine and healthcare, but, Turner said, “AI means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.” Laber defined AI in healthcare simply as using data to make healthcare better. “From a data science perspective,” Vissoci said, “[it is] synthesizing data … an automated way to give us back information.” This returned info is digestible trends and understandings derived from very big, very complex data sets. Tatem stated that AI has already “revolutionized what we can do” and said it is “powerful if it is directed in the right way.”

A screenshot from worldpop.org

We often get sucked into a science-fiction version of AI, Laber said, but in actuality it is not some dystopian future but a set of tools that maximizes what can be derived from data.

However, as Tatem stated, “[AI] is not a magic, press a button” scenario where you get automatic results. A huge part of work for researchers like Tatem, Vissoci, and Laber is the “harmonization” of working with data producers, understanding data quality, integrating data sets, cleaning data, and other “back-end” processes.

This comes with many caveats.

“Bias is a huge problem,” said Laber. Vissoci reinforced this, stating that the models built from AI and data science are going to represent what data sources they are able to access – bias included. “We need better work in getting better data,” Vissoci said.

Further, there must be more up-front listening to and communication with “end-users from the very start” of projects, Tatem outlined. By taking a step back and listening, tools created through AI and data science may be better met with actual uptake and less skepticism or distrust. Vissoci said that “direct engagement with the people on the ground” transforms data into meaningful information.

Better structures for meandering privacy issues must also be developed. “A major overhaul is still needed,” said Laber. This includes things like better consent processes for patients’ to understand how their data is being used, although Tatem said this becomes “very complex” when integrating data.

Nonetheless the future looks promising and each panelist feels confident that the benefits will outweigh the difficulties that are yet to come in introducing big data to global health. One cool example Vissoci gave of an ongoing project deals with the influence of environmental change through deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on the impacts of Indigenous populations. Through work with “heavy multidimensional data,” Vissoci and his team also have been able to optimize scarcely distributed Covid vaccine resource “to use in areas where they can have the most impact.”

Laber envisions a world with reduced or even no clinical trials if “randomization and experimentation” are integrated directly into healthcare systems. Tatem noted how he has seen extreme growth in the field in just the last 10 to 15 years, which seems only to be accelerating.

A lot of this work has to do with making better decisions about allocating resources, as Turner stated in the beginning of the panel. In an age of reassessment about equity and access, AI and data science could serve to bring both to the field of global health.

Post by Cydney Livingston

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