Owais Raza

Owais Raza is a research scientist at the Buffett Institute, where he works with the Applied Research team to support data-driven improvements in early childhood systems. He has over a decade of experience in public health research, teaching, and mentorship, with a career shaped by a strong commitment to maternal-child health, health access, and social determinants of health.

His work focuses on understanding how social, structural, and community-level factors shape health and well-being, particularly among underserved populations. Trained as an epidemiologist, Raza has led and contributed to numerous research projects using large population-based datasets, including demographic and health surveys (DHS), with an emphasis on rigorous causal thinking and policy-relevant analysis. He has extensive experience in spatial epidemiology and advanced quantitative methods.

Before joining the Institute, Raza held academic and research positions, where he taught public health courses, supervised graduate and postgraduate research, and published in peer-reviewed journals. He is proficient in R, Stata, and ArcGIS, and is a strong advocate for open science, reproducible analysis, and reporting. Raza’s work is guided by a belief that good research should be methodologically sound, ethically grounded, and directly connected to improving lives.