Leontine Alkema is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Alkema’s research focuses on the development of statistical models to assess trends and differentials in reproductive, maternal, and child health outcomes worldwide. She has developed estimation and projection methods for key global indicators, such as the under-five mortality rate, maternal mortality, usage of and unmet need for contraceptive methods, abortion incidence, and total fertility. She collaborates with various United Nations agencies, the World Health Organization, the FP2030 community, and Guttmacher Institute to help make available improved estimation methods, software and resulting model-based estimates to diverse international audiences. Before joining UMass Amherst in 2015, she was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the National university of Singapore (2009-2016), visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Demography at UC Berkeley (2014), and Postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University (2008-2009). She hold a PhD degree in Statistics from the University of Washington in Seattle and an MSc in Applied Mathematics from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
