Epidemiologic Modeling to Advance Women's Health and Wellbeing in South Africa

Katherine Rucinski of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will develop a platform for understanding the determinants of women’s heath inequities in South Africa and for modeling the effects of health interventions. The project will be implemented through collaboration with the Pan African Centre for Epidemics Research, which is part of the University of Johannesburg and the South African Medical Research Council. Machine learning will be applied to datasets publicly available in South Africa to identify the factors underlying the co-occurrence of chronic health conditions that disproportionally affect women. Data modeling will then be performed to identify interventions that most efficiently and effectively reduce these health disparities. This approach will be integrated into a web-based simulation tool for epidemiological modeling of women’s health across diverse contexts.