Matthew Macfarlane, Mph Email & Phone Number

Greater New York City Area

This increased role adds new responsibilities around managing organization-wide integration of Qualtrics into IT systems and training new staff on the processes previously developed while continuing to upgrade and innovate on new approaches for web- and SMS-based data collection. It also includes a new appointment working as the operations lead on a large-scale surveying effort with more than 7,000 secondary school students at 20 schools across the United States several times a year. This includes managing the technical aspects of the surveys, acting as the primary point of contact with school site administrators, leading donor discussions and updates, and coordinating internal team responsibilities.

Greater New York City Area

Originated a new role within MDRC focused on managing web- and SMS-based data collection efforts. This required creating new research-focused processes and guidelines to lead programming, administration, and all technical aspects of surveying through Qualtrics within the organization. I worked with more than 100 different project teams to survey families, secondary school students, low wage workers, college students, and others on varied evaluation and technical assistance efforts.

New York, United States

Created a published report synthesizing findings from separate evaluations of child marriage in humanitarian settings, including writing, referencing, and managing input from reviewers. Separately developed a two-page summary synthesis report for at-a-glance review of the findings from the evaluations aimed at lay audiences in the international development field.

Greater New York City Area

Coordinated a large, NIH-funded, study to develop and validate a tool for identifying core structures and processes at primary care practices in the United States that are related to high performance on key health outcomes. Activities included general oversight and day-to-day management of the project and collaboration with partners as well as contributing to a scoping review of existing literature and planning for a large Delphi study.

Ottawa, Canada Area

Developed a lay-oriented evidence brief, including the creation of figures, for the Trickle Up cash transfer and coaching program by synthesizing research data and results from numerous studies.

Working with the ICT4D and Digital Health teams, this cross-sectoral position included work on a number of different projects. Primarily, I gathered information on mHealth activities for World Vision globally to write and produce the mHealth Global report. This document gave an overview of mHealth work and focused in detail on several different monitoring and evaluation exercises building evidence about what does and does not work for digital health.In addition to the report, the position included detailed mapping of different monitoring indicator sets in health and nutrition programs to ensure alignment between donor, government, and organizational priorities. Further, I performed an assessment of mHealth readiness in the World Vision Mauritania office, developing and implementing both quantitative and qualitative tools in French to produce a roadmap report on challenges and next steps for implementing mHealth activities in that country. Finally, I created and facilitated mHealth data analysis training in Sierra Leone to improve baseline capacity of M&E field staff working with CommCare data.

Greater New York City Area

Based at Columbia University, this position entailed management of a variety of projects, with a particular focus on measuring separation of children in emergencies. A suite of three interconnected approaches, the goal of this research was to develop a tool to equip organizations to better react to chronic and rapid-onset emergencies by giving them the capacity to evaluate the numbers and characteristics of separated children. Through the use of a community surveillance tool, a household survey tool, and a residential care-oriented tool, the initiative developed a new standard for the field with the goal of improving the programmatic response to help unaccompanied and separated children in emergencies everywhere. In addition to contributing on the overall study design and coordination of multi-disciplinary advisory groups, I personally led tool creation and fieldwork in response to humanitarian emergencies in Ethiopia and Haiti. This entailed selecting, training, and supervising data collection teams as well as clearing ethical review processes and local approvals. Following data collection, I led analysis and writing for multiple journal publications.Outside of this project, I also contributed to a systematic review of household violence in humanitarian settings, grant proposal development, and oversight of ongoing research on child violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Liberia, Ghana, And Sierra Leone

During my time with Innovations for Poverty Action, I had the unique experience of working for three different country offices on a wide variety of projects. The Ebola crisis in Liberia and Sierra Leone altered my original position in rural Liberia and led me to the role of Acting Research Manager in the company's Ghana office while maintaining projects in Sierra Leone and Liberia. My key accomplishments from this time included managing an mHealth-related Ebola Contact Tracing intervention in Sierra Leone, which entailed coordinating with various partners in the training, implementation, and measurement aspects of the project. I was also responsible for directing the development and launch of a mobile application on the CommCare platform for use by health workers in difficult-to-reach areas of the country.In Liberia, I led development of a baseline survey evaluation of an educational empowerment program for 2000 adolescent girls in rural Liberia run by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and in Ghana I oversaw 4 health and microfinance projects. In both countries I directly managed local staff and PI and partner relationships while simultaneously ensuring data quality.I also acted as the project development point person in the Ghana office doing qualitative and quantitative investigations into potential areas for future intervention, such as rural to urban migration and health product pricing.

Sierra Leone

This project was a midline evaluation for an ongoing teenage pregnancy reduction program in 12 villages in rural Sierra Leone run by Columbia University. I acted as the methodology lead in the process of transferring a previously paper-based study to mobile data collection, while also training and leading a team of Sierra Leonean researchers to perform mobile-based surveys in communities. The surveys required collecting sensitive data around violence and sexual experiences from adolescents aged 11-19, necessitating stringent consent and ethical processes. Following data collection, I analyzed the longitudinal data set in SAS using multivariable regression techniques to determine effects of the intervention including knowledge, attitude, and habit shifts. From this analysis I wrote a lay-oriented research brief for partners at Save the Children summarizing these findings and looking forward to a 2014 endline survey.

Jakarta, Indonesia

The Legal Identity Project through the University of Indonesia focused on the low level of official registration in the Indonesian population, and the barriers therein. Working with a multicultural team over the course of several months, we performed quantitative data collection in 3 Indonesian provinces, visiting the households of 2000 children. As a member of the senior field leadership team, I contributed to the study design and sample size calculation while leading the creation of the paper-based survey tool. I then trained and led a multi-cultural team of 11 people to use a mixed methods approach (including survey and focus groups) to interview approximately 250 female heads of household in rural communities over two weeks.Following the end of data collection, I used SAS to perform multivariable analyses of results focusing on the relationship between access to health and education and the ownership of legal identity documents. I presented these results in written and graphical forms in a report geared towards a non-scientific audience.

For the 2012-2013 school year at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, I acted as Head Teaching Assistant for a graduate-level class entitled Science, Evidence, and Public Policy. I also had weekly sessions for the Globalization & Global Health and Leadership & Innovation classes, working with a group of 25 students over the course of a semester. My responsibilities during this time included acting as the liaison between students, professors, and other TAs around coordinating communication on assignments and posting required readings to the course website. I was also tasked with organizing schedules and other logistical details for lectures, assignments, and exams, and leading weekly sessions for 20+ students on a variety of topics, ranging from the use of DALYs in global health to working on large group projects and presentations. Finally, I graded course materials and contributed to weekly meetings with the course directors.

The Rural Senegal Mobile Health project was geared towards evaluating the feasibility, level of acceptance, and possible applications of mobile phones among field staff in the Senegalese National Malaria Control Program. Working in a rural part of the country entirely in French, I was responsible for overseeing the data collection aspects of the study and demonstrating the possible applications on basic mobile phones using the FrontlineSMS platform. In this setting I was responsible for working with local partners to develop and execute surveys, focus groups and interviews among community health workers and key stakeholders in the National Malaria Control program. This also entailed coordinating logistics and budgetary issues in the field, overseeing the data entry process, and contributing to the writing and editing of a published journal article.My work on this project was also selected to present a 15-minute oral summary of results and experiences to a mixed lay and scientific audience at Columbia University.

Master Of Public Health (M.P.H.), Epidemiology

Broad education in Epidemiology and other Public Health areas, with a focus on statistical methods of analysis using SAS and quantitative.

Bachelor Of Science (B.Sc.) With Honours, Zoology/Animal Biology

A Bachelors of Science degree in Zoology with a focus on parasitic disease and the interaction between the natural world and human health.