Isha Berry

I am studying to be an epidemiologist. I research the way infectious diseases spread between people, and from animals to people. My work focuses on trying to understand how population behaviours and other factors affect the spread of disease.

I work with global and local teams to design and carry out population surveys. We ask individuals questions about their daily activities. This includes who they interact with (including animals!), and where they buy their food. Other questions ask about their hygiene practices as well as their general health and well-being. The answers to these survey questions become the data that we analyze. The goals of these analyses are to identify patterns in the population. It also helps us understand behavioural and system-level factors related to health outcomes. To do this, I use statistics and code my analyses in software packages like Stata or R.

I spend the last major part of my time writing up my findings. I have to interpret my findings to understand what the numbers mean. To do this I summarize the statistical results. I write papers to share this with other researchers. Here, I focus on how the data were collected and how analyses were conducted.  I also write papers to share information with the populations who contributed to the data. When I do this, I highlight the key health outcomes.

Three things make up my work. These are project set-up, statistical analysis, and writing. Usually these flow over the course of a month or so. Sometimes they all happen in the same day!