Zach Ward is an Assistant Professor of Health Decision Science in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
His research interests are at the intersection of computational science, epidemiology, and decision science. He uses simulation-based approaches to evaluate the comparative and cost-effectiveness of strategies to address various topics in global health, including obesity, cancer, and maternal health. Dr. Ward is also the author of Amua, an open source modelling framework and probabilistic programming language.
For the CHOICES Project, Dr. Ward is the primary model developer/programmer for the CHOICES microsimulation model. His research with CHOICES has included forecasting growth trajectories for children in the United States, as well as correcting state prevalence of adult obesity for self-report bias.
Prior to joining Harvard, Dr. Ward worked with various community-based NGOs in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda, creating health information systems and management tools. He holds an MPH from l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique and a PhD from Harvard University.