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“I want to contribute in addressing the gaps in national data management, so that policymakers can make better health-related decisions.”
I started my journey as a public health professional in 2018. Before that I was working in communications research on multiple themes including health, governance and resilience. Being a statistics person by training, I mostly managed the quantitative research activities in my previous jobs. I always wanted to concentrate on what I had on my plate at that moment and tried to deliver as much as I could with my level of perfection. I would not call my journey to be an ideal one, but I acknowledge my path has come this far and I finally landed at this career of a public health researcher.
During my work in communications research, I had to think a lot on how to communicate science in a palatable way for the general people. While working in a more rigorous scientific environment at icddr,b I find my understanding of communicating research is very useful. In the course of my job trainings, I had to handle large datasets which required particular skill and experience. Whenever we deep dive into a data we often realise that there are data gaps, errors and incompleteness which need to be rectified. This is a long journey which can hardly be seen or perceived when we look into our published materials. I want to be a part of this data journey and keep learning from my experiences. While working in maternal and child health domain, I have grown particular interest in the mental health aspects. I believe that with the uprising stress and anxieties in people’s lives, this area offers a lot of scope to explore.
At icddr,b I got opportunities to work in projects in collaboration with multiple national and international organisations. I worked with the Health Economics Unit (HEU) and Non-Communicable Disease Control (NCDC) of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Bangladesh. Also, I had opportunities to work with the researchers of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and University of Edinburgh. Major donors of the studies where I was involved, were USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), WHO and UNFPA. I sincerely appreciate the mentorship that I receive in all my works that I have been doing.
Why I work at icddr,b:
We need to think beyond our projects and ways to scale the impact of our short time outcomes. icddr,b gives us a platform to communicate with global and national researchers to get greater visibility of our work. Moreover, we get more opportunities to liaise with the government which helps us to plan for making our project impacts more sustainable in the longer term.
Future Plans:
I would like to work on improving the national data management system for health so that people can make more use of it for effective decision making.
2018 - till date
Research Investigator, Maternal and Child Health Division, icddr,b
2013 - 2018
Research Officer, BBC Media Action
2013
M.S. in Biostatistics , McGill University
2012 - 2013
Research Assistant, Respiratory Epidemiology and Clinical Research Unit (RECRU), McGill University
2011
Research Associate, BRAC: Research and Evaluation Division (RED)
M.S. in Applied Statistics, The University of Dhaka
2009
B.S. in Applied Statistics, The University of Dhaka
Social Science, Statistics, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Public Health, Maternal and Child Health
Publications
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