About Us

Jon Wakefield started working on space-time smoothing methods for survey data around 2008, when the Washington State Department of Health asked for help analyzing Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS data). Previously, he had been at Imperial College in London, first in the Department of Mathematics and then the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health where from 1996, he led the statistics group at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit whose remit was to analyze health statistics in the UK at a small geographic scale, with an emphasis on cancer and heart disease. During this time (1996-1999) he was involved in developing models for disease mapping, cluster detection and spatial regression, in particular working on ecological bias. Moving to UW in 1999, he worked in space-time modeling of infectious disease data. Then, in 2013, one of his PhD students, Laina Mercer started working on space-time models for the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) subnational estimation in Tanzania, based on household survey data.

Jon, Laina, Richard Zehang Li (who was at that point completing a PhD in the Department of Statistics at UW) and Jessica Godwin started a working group in around 2017, and this became the Space Time Analysis Bayes (STAB) group a couple of years later. Richard, Jon and Sam Clark (at the time a professor in the Department of Sociology at UW), along with Yuan Hsiao, Jessica Godwin and Bryan Martin, produced admin-1 estimates of U5MR across 35 sub-Saharan African countries. Around 2016, Jon started presenting on methods for subnational child mortality estimates at the United Nations (UN) Inter-agency Group for Mortality Estimation (IGME). The group produced the official UN IGME subnational under-5 and neonatal mortality risks in 2021 and 2023 . The STAB Lab produced these estimates, with Alana McGovern and Jessica Godwin, taking the lead. Jon works a lot with the UN and the World Health Organization (WHO). Victoria Knutson and Jon lead the methodological developments and Victoria did the analyses that produced the WHO excess mortality estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic .