"Moral Mathematics" Conference Schedule

"Moral Mathematics" Participants

Patrick Ball, "Unexpected data, or, The peril of 'common sense' about political violence"

Ball is Chief Scientist and the Director of the Human Rights Program at the Benetech Initiative. Since 1991, Dr. Ball has designed information management systems and conducted statistical analysis for large-scale human rights data projects used by truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, tribunals and United Nations missions in more than twenty countries. Dr. Ball is currently involved in Benetech projects in Colombia, Liberia, Guatemala and consulting to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court.

David Banks, moderator

David Banks is a professor at Duke University in the Department of Statistical Science. He recently edited Statistical Methods for Human Rights (with Jana Asher and Fritz Scheuren). His activities in the analysis of human rights data go back more than 20 years.

Beth Osborne Daponte, "Wartime Estimates of Iraqi Civilian Casualties"

Beth Osborne Daponte is a Senior Research Scholar at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. In 1992, the U.S. Census Bureau proposed to fire her from her position as the Middle East analyst for the Center for International Research at the U.S. Census after the work that she had done while at the bureau on Iraqi mortality during the 1991 Persian Gulf found its way into the press. With a team of attorneys provided by the ACLU, she retained her position. She has since authored a number of publications on conflict, including "A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and Its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War," in PSR Quarterly (1993); "A Case Study of the Impact of Sanctions against Iraq prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War," in the American Journal of Public Health (2000) (with Richard Garfield); "Wartime Estimates of Civilian Casualties," in the International Review of the Red Cross (forthcoming); "Why Estimate Direct and Indirect Casualties from War? The Rule of Proportionality and Casualty Estimates," in Statistical Methods for Human Rights, Asher, Banks and Scheuren (eds), 2008; and "Bayesian Demography: Projecting the Iraqi Kurdish Population, 1977-1990." Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1997 (with Joseph Kadane and Lara Wolfson). Her other fields of research are U.S. food assistance programs and program evaluation. Her book, Evaluation Essentials, will be published in July 2008 by Wiley.

Jonathan Howard, "Survey Methodology and the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Team"

Jonathan Howard served as a research analyst in the Department of State's Office of Research from 2003 through February 2008. Mr. Howard was responsible for leading public opinion polling in Africa for the State Department, and during his tenure managed research in more than 16 countries across the continent. In 2004, he served in Chad as the survey methodologist for the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Team, a project which documented the stories of 1,200 refugees and led to the determination by Secretary Powell that Sudan was perpetrating genocide in Darfur. Mr. Howard holds a M.A. in Comparative Politics and African Studies from the University of Virginia, and is now serving as an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service.

Cynthia Irvin, moderator

Dr. Cynthia Irvin, a political scientist, specializes in the areas of human rights, social movements (focusing on the relationships between political parties and paramilitary organizations), civil society engagement and post-conflict peacebuilding. Prior to joining RTI, Dr. Irvin was engaged in a number of US and international projects focusing on community empowerment, including political, social and economic development. As director of research at the Inter-American Center for Human Rights, she was involved in community outreach projects with asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants from multiple Central and South American communities From 1989-1999, she consulted for numerous community development and cross-community reconciliation organizations in Northern Ireland. From 1980 to 1986, she worked with human rights groups from Chile and Argentina documenting cases of torture. Dr. Irvin has extensive field research experience in areas of severe or protracted conflict. She has consulted for The Economist (risk analysis) and has given presentations on Capitol Hill related to terrorism and human rights. She is the author of Militant Nationalism: Between Movement and Party in Ireland and the Basque Country, co-editor of Reconcilable Differences: Turning Points in Ethnopolitical Conflict, and numerous journal articles.

Ron Johnson, The Sources of Legitimacy: Accountability in Iraq

Dr. Ron Johnson is former Executive Vice President for International Development at RTI International (RTI). He is an internationally recognized expert in governance strategies to stabilize post-conflict situations, urban infrastructure financing and municipal finance decentralization policy and strategies. He designed the RTI Iraq Local Governance Program and continues his involvement in the development of a new system of governance for Iraq. Dr. Johnson has designed and implemented decentralization and local finance and management projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the ADB. He has advised on issues of decentralization policy, revenue improvement, capital budgeting, municipal service performance improvement, and financial information systems for small municipalities and major cities of the world, including Asuncion, Bangkok, Bogota, La Paz, Montevideo, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Vladivostok. He is co-author of Public Budgeting Systems and author of numerous articles on decentralization strategies and municipal finance and management, as well as conference papers on infrastructure financing and urban environmental services.

Robin Kirk, moderator

An award-winning author and human rights activist, Robin Kirk teaches at Duke University and coordinates the Duke Human Rights Center. She is the author of three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia and The Monkey's Paw: New Chronicles from Peru. She is the coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and co-edits Duke University Press's Reader series. In 2006, she was a Fulbright lecturer at the Human Rights Center at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. As a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports on Peru and Colombia, all available on-line. Kirk is a former Radcliffe Bunting Fellow and is a past winner of the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for Freelance Writing.

Dr. Christopher Krebs and Rachel Caspar, "The National Inmate Survey (NIS)"

Dr. Christopher P. Krebs is a Senior Research Social Scientist at RTI. He has extensive research experience in the areas of delinquency and juvenile justice, corrections, drug policy, substance abuse epidemiology and treatment, intimate partner violence and sexual violence, HIV transmission among and associated high-risk behaviors of offenders and inmates, criminal justice systems, and program evaluation. He has led and worked on a number of proposals and projects for the National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He has employed both quantitative and qualitative methods in his research and has extensive experience designing studies, developing survey instruments, analyzing data, and disseminating findings. Dr. Krebs has published and presented numerous research papers on a wide variety of topics.

Rachel A. Caspar, Director of the Program for Research in Survey Methodology and a Senior Survey Methodologist, has been with RTI since 1988. She specializes in designing questionnaires and developing data collection procedures for surveys of sensitive topics. Ms. Caspar's methodological research has been broad-based, focusing on survey methods for capturing data on sensitive topics, questionnaire evaluation and testing, and designing and implementing ACASI instruments. She is an Instructor for the Odum Institute's Certificate Program in Survey Methodology and regularly teaches courses on questionnaire design at the University of North Carolina, the University of Maryland, and at the University of Michigan's Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques.

Elizabeth M. McClure is a Research Health Analyst who has been with RTI since 2001. Currently, in collaboration with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the study investigators, she leads the data center activities on a multisite, international trial of newborn resuscitation being conducted in India, Pakistan, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Argentina, and Guatemala.

Diane Nelson, "Who Counts? Genocide and After/math in Guatemala"

Diane Nelson is an anthropologist and has worked in Guatemala since 1985. Her research addresses the causes and effects of war, genocide and human rights, theorizing the state, indigenous identity and political movements, political economy, gender and sexuality, popular culture, and science and technology. She has written three books: Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (2008), A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999) and Guatemala: los polos de desarrollo: el caso de la desestructuracion de las comunidades indigenas, Vol. 2 (Development Poles: The Case of the Destructuring/Destruction of Indigenous Communities) (1988). She is an Associate Professor in the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University.

Lara Wolfson, "The Mathematics of Global Public Health: Numbers at the Frontiers of Disease Control"

Dr Lara J. Wolfson is currently Programme Manager in the office of the Assistant Director-General for the Health Security and the Environment Cluster at the World Health Organization. This cluster includes the Departments of Food Safety, Zoonoses and Foodborne Diseases; Public Health and the Environment; Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Response; the International Health Regulations; and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Previously, she was a Scientist in the Initiative for Vaccine Research at the World Health Organization, focusing on research relating to the implementation of vaccines and immunization, including monitoring and evaluation, burden of disease, mathematical modelling, immunization economics (including cost-effectiveness, innovative financing, and evidence based decision making for new vaccine introduction) and optimization of immunization delivery systems. Prior to joining WHO, she was Associate Professor of Statistics at Brigham Young University (USA), where her research focused on the use of statistics in public policy related issues, particularly focusing on quantifying expert opinion for use in statistical models for decision making. She also held an academic appointment at the University of Waterloo (Canada). She has PhD and MS degrees in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Economics from Simon Fraser University (Canada).