Zach Ward is a Research Scientist at the Center for Health Decision Science (CHDS) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Ward is a decision scientist with research interests in computational science and global health. His research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet Oncology, and Health Affairs. He is also the author of Amua, an open source modeling 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.
Dr. Ward is also a Research Scientist at the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and graduated from the Ph.D. Program in Health Policy at Harvard University in 2021, with a concentration in Decision Sciences and a secondary field in Computational Science and Engineering. He received his undergraduate degree in Global Health Management from Seattle Pacific University and his Masters of Public Health from l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique (EHESP) in Paris, with a concentration in Epidemiology.
Originally from Kenya, Dr. Ward has worked with various community-based NGOs in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda, creating health information systems and management tools. At Harvard he has developed microsimulation models focused on various topics, including childhood obesity, childhood cancer, and maternal mortality.