Samuel J. Clark

Samuel J. Clark is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University (OSU), with affiliations to the Institute for Population Research and Translational Data Analytics Institute. He holds additional affiliations with the University of Washington's Department of Statistics and the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Public Health. His expertise spans demography, epidemiology, and data science, with a focus on verbal autopsy methods and mortality modeling.

Clark earned a PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and BS degrees in Engineering and Applied Science and Biology from Caltech. His research improves verbal autopsy tools for disease burden measurement, develops mathematical mortality models, and creates open-source software (e.g., openVA) for mortality analysis. During the pandemic, he led projects to estimate Ohio's COVID-19 mortality burden through collaborative studies with state health departments.

His work with the WHO Verbal Autopsy Reference Group (VARG) ensures global standardization of VA practices. Key contributions include the SVD-Comp mortality model and the openVA toolkit, widely used in low-resource settings for automated cause-of-death assignment.