About the talk: This presentation will discuss the centrality and challenges of health-specific technological progress in global health improvement. It will describe a research agenda and provide examples of specific empirical studies and findings that are part of the agenda.

About the speaker: Grant Miller is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography.

Professor Miller’s primary focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries. His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes: (1) The major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time (2) Behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement - which factors have contributed most to population health gains, and why? (3) From insights to policy relevance: how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively? 

Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013): USAID and the UN's World Food Program have proposed strategies for allocating ready-to-use (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal data set of 5657 children from Bwamanda to construct a statistical model that tracks each child's height and weight  throughout the first five years of life. We embed this model into an optimization framework that chooses which individual children should receive food based on a child's sex, age, height and weight, to minimize the mean number of disability-adjusted life years per child subject to a budget constraint. Our proposed policy compares favorably to those proposed by the aid groups. Time permitting, we will also discuss a recent analysis of a nutrition program in Guatemala that quantifies the age dependence in the impact of supplementary food, and develops a food allocation policy that exploits this age dependence and reduces child stunting.

India: Motivated by India's nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess 12 similarity scores (for 10 fingerprints and two irises) between a resident's biometric images at enrollment and his biometric images during his first verification. At subsequent verifications, we allow individualized strategies based on these 12 scores: we acquire a subset of the 12 images, get new scores for this subset that quantify the similarity to the corresponding enrollment images, and use the likelihood ratio to decide whether a resident is genuine or an imposter. Compared to the policy currently used in India, our proposed policy provides a five-log (i.e., 100,000-fold) reduction in the false reject rate while only increasing the mean delay from 31 to 38 seconds.

A full speaker bio is available on CISAC's website. 

Kelly Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati.  She is the author of Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and the co-editor of The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).   Her articles have appeared in Research in Organizational Sociology, American Journal of Sociology and other journals.  She currently serves as Chair of the American Sociological Association section on Science, Knowledge and Technology, and is writing a book about neoliberalism, food, and nutrition in U.S. from 1980 to 2005. 

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Her research examines how technical judgments are generated, taken up, and given significance in international security contexts. She is currently working on a book which uses the history of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program to study the relationships between and among technology, expertise, and the media. Portions of this work have been published in journals such as History and Technology and have been presented at academic conferences. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2004 she completed an NSF-funded project entitled Public Science: Discourse about the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983-1988.

As a physical chemist, she developed ultrafast laser experiments in condensed matter systems and published several articles in physics journals. She also received the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist for a daily paper and for Physical Review Focus. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002.