Before starting graduate school, I worked as a science journalist for over a decade. For outlets including Science, the Washington Post, Wired, and Mother Jones, I covered a range of health and science topics. In 2005, I produced an award-winning documentary for CNN on how problematic forensic science methods were contributing to wrongful convictions. 

A common theme in my reporting was that scientific controversies tended to involve questions about how data was analyzed, and I spent a lot of time calling experts to better understand the issues. Eventually, I decided I wanted to understand data analysis better myself, and I went back to school for an MPH. That turned out to be a gateway drug; once I realized how much more I wanted to learn, I stayed for a PhD.  

In my first position after graduate school, at Carnegie Mellon University, I fell in love with teaching -- it provided an opportunity to marry my interests in communication with the technical skills I'd developed. At the University of Washington, I am excited to bring my interests full circle and return to public health. I'm honored to have the opportunity to teach and work with students who are the future of the field.

My research interests include disparities in health outcomes and health care access, as well as statistical issues related to criminal justice. Recent projects include:

• Co-director, Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence, a multi-university NIST Center of Excellence.

  • Label the Limits of Forensic Science (Nature, April 2017)

  • What does a match mean? A framework for understanding forensic comparisons (Royal Statistical Society, April 2019)

• Faculty lead, the COVID-19 Trends & Impact Survey, which collected an average of 15,000 responses per day from April 2020-June 2022

• Working Where Statistics and Human Rights Meet (For a special issue of ASA Chance guest-edited by Mejia)