Aug 2026
Mathew Kiang
Yes, with one "t".
Assistant Professor at Stanford University.Social and computational epidemiologist.
Timeline
Now
Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Social and computational epidemiologist.
I'm interested in understanding how the structures of society pattern health outcomes and exposures. Often, this requires working with data not intended for health research (e.g., cellphone location data, social media data) and using quantitative methods from other fields. Learn more →
- Jun 2026
Talk: Decomposing the US drug overdose crisis
Society for Epidemiologic Research Annual Meeting 2026: Phoenix, AZ
- May 2026
- May 2026
Talk: Geographic variation in the quality of US mortality data, 1999-2022
Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2026: St. Louis, MO
- Mar 2026
- Feb 2026
Paper: Trends in county-level childhood vaccination exemptions in the US
JAMA
ABC, CNN, NBC, NPR, and 10 more
- Jan 2026
Blog: Collaboration network: 2025 edition
Looking back on what I think can be fairly described as a chaotic year (professionally), three events really encapsulated what it was like being in academia. In January (2025), I…
- Dec 2025
Blog: A walk in the park
San Francisco has a lot of parks. Depending on who you ask, there are 230, 280, or 510 different parks, playgrounds, and green spaces spread across SF’s 47 square miles of land…
- Nov 2025
Paper: Wildfire smoke exposure and mortality burden in the USA under climate change
Nature
CBS, Washington Post, Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, and 8 more
- Aug 2025
Paper: Temperature extremes impact mortality and morbidity differently
Science Advances
CBS, Washington Post, The Hill, US News, and 3 more
- Jul 2025
Paper: Youths experiencing parental death due to cancer
JAMA Network Open
- Jun 2025
- May 2025
- May 2025
Blog: Debriefing our JAMA paper on vaccination in the US
About three weeks ago, our paper modeling the reemergence of vaccine-eliminated diseases in the US was published. We used microsimulation to evaluate different scenarios of…
- Apr 2025
Paper: Which social media platforms facilitate monitoring the opioid crisis?
PLOS Digital Health
- Mar 2025
Blog: Catching up + Collaboration network update: 2010-2024
You wouldn’t know it from the lack of updates on this blog, but it’s been a busy couple years. I’m sure I’m missing many important things, but a few highlights include: Ben’s JAMA…
- Feb 2025
- Feb 2025
- Jan 2025
Blog: Analyzing San Francisco’s parking citation data
San Francisco issues about 5,000 parking citations per day, resulting in over 21.4 million parking citations to over 5.2 million unique license plates since January 2008. That’s a…
- Oct 2024
- Jun 2024
Talk: Applying machine learning to identify unrecognized COVID-19 deaths attributed to other causes of death in the United States
Society for Epidemiologic Research Annual Meeting 2024: Austin, TX
- May 2024
Paper: Youth experiencing parental death due to drug poisoning and firearm violence in the US, 1999–2020
JAMA
CNN, NBC News, British Medical Journal, Albany Herald, and 4 more
- May 2024
Paper: Estimated childhood lead exposure from drinking water in Chicago
JAMA Pediatrics
- Feb 2024
Blog: My biking in 2023 vs 2022
Following up on my previous blogpost about my biking, here’s a quick update on how my biking went last year. My goals were flipped from last year — 2,500 miles outdoors (vs 1,500…
- Feb 2024
Paper: Mitigating allocative tradeoffs and harms in an environmental justice data tool
Nature Machine Intelligence
- Sep 2023
Paper: Emergency department visits respond nonlinearly to wildfire smoke
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Jun 2023
- Apr 2023
- Apr 2023
Paper: Excess mortality among US physicians during the COVID-19 pandemic
JAMA Internal Medicine
ABC, Washington Post, MedPage Today, Medscape, and 4 more
- Apr 2023
Talk: Occupational disparities in excess mortality due to external causes during the pandemic
Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2023: New Orleans, LA
- Feb 2023
- Jan 2023
Blog: My collaboration network: 2010 to 2022 version
There was a lot going on last year and I missed my annual tradition of updating my collaboration network at the end of the year. However, thanks to a perpetual illness ravaging…
- Jan 2023
Blog: Plots of my biking in 2022
One of the best things about living in California is having amazing weather nearly all year long (the current 3-week-stretch-of-non-stop-rain aside). So last year, I decided to…
- Dec 2022
Blog: It finally happened — I got COVID
Last September, I got COVID. It was wildly unpleasant with serious brain fog that lasted for several weeks even after the other symptoms went away. That said, this did give me the…
- Oct 2022
Paper: Dynamics of racial disparities in all-cause mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Aug 2022
- Jul 2022
- Jul 2022
Paper: Sociodemographic and geographic disparities in excess fatal drug overdoses during the COVID-19 pandemic in California: a population-based study
The Lancet Regional Health - Americas
- May 2022
Paper: Recent shifts in racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality in the vaccination period in California
Journal of General Internal Medicine
- Apr 2022
Talk: Colliding Crises: Excess fatal drug overdoses in California during the COVID-19 pandemic by race/ethnicity, education attainment, and geography
Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2022: Atlanta, GA
- Jan 2022
- Jan 2022
- Dec 2021
Paper: Public health impacts of an imminent Red Sea oil spill
Nature Sustainability
BBC, CNN, i24, The World
- Nov 2021
Paper: Robustness of estimated access to opioid use disorder treatment providers in rural vs. urban areas of the United States
Drug and Alcohol Dependence
- Oct 2021
Paper: Data in crisis — Rethinking disaster preparedness in the United States
New England Journal of Medicine
- Oct 2021
Paper: Geographically targeted COVID-19 vaccination is more equitable and averts more deaths than age-based thresholds alone
Science Advances
Fox, USA Today, The Conversation, Houston Chronicle, and 3 more
- Oct 2021
- Jul 2021
- Jul 2021
- Jul 2021
Paper: Routine asymptomatic testing strategies for airline travel during the COVID-19 pandemic: a simulation study
The Lancet Infectious Diseases
- Mar 2021
Blog: Our paper looking at different COVID-19 testing/quarantine strategies for air travel
Our new The Lancet Infectious Diseases paper is out. We used microsimulation to evaluate different testing and quarantine strategies for air travel. The simulation incorporates…
- Jan 2021
Blog: Comparing epidemics
In all likelihood, the US will end up with more (direct) deaths from COVID-19 than the “opioid epidemic” since 1999. Using the CDC WONDER data for opioid deaths and the NYTimes…
- Jan 2021
Paper: Incorporating human mobility data improves forecasts of Dengue fever in Thailand
Scientific Reports
- Dec 2020
Blog: Student’s Tay Distribution
Taylor Swift has recorded 9 albums, each of them (except the most recent) has gone multi-platinum. In total, she has sold over 200 million records, won 10 Grammy’s, an Emmy, 32…
- Dec 2020
Paper: Every body counts: Measuring mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic
Annals of Internal Medicine
- Dec 2020
Blog: My collaboration network for 2010 to 2020 (+ other plots)
In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, here is my collaboration network for 2010 to 2020. This year was rough. Of the two first-author papers published this year, one…
- Dec 2020
Paper: Power outages and community health: A narrative review
Current Environmental Health Reports
ABC, NPR, Washington Post, Forbes, and 7 more
- Nov 2020
Blog: Comparing daily (direct) COVID-19 deaths to other causes of death
It’s easy to get numb at this stage of the pandemic, but a friendly reminder that daily COVID-19 (direct) deaths have been consistently higher than 8 of the top 10 causes of death…
- Nov 2020
- Oct 2020
- Oct 2020
Blog: Applying an intro-level networks concept to deleting tweets
There are a few services out there that will delete your old tweets for you, but I wanted to delete tweets with a bit more control. For example, there are some tweets I need to…
- Sep 2020
- Jun 2020
Blog: Things to consider before applying for a K99/R00
It officially looks like I’ll be awarded a K99/R00 (!!). The application process was a long, overwhelming slog — only possible with the generous support of mentors, colleagues…
- Mar 2020
- Feb 2020
Blog: Our new paper about opioid prescribing patterns in the US
Some notes about a new (open access) paper with Keith Humphreys, Mark Cullen, and Sanjay Basu — “ Opioid prescribing patterns among medical providers in the United States…
- Jan 2020
- Dec 2019
Blog: Collaboration network from 2010 to 2019
I have been trying to wrap my head around working with temporal networks — not just simple edge activation that changes over time but also evolving node attributes and nodes that…
- Nov 2019
- Jun 2019
Talk: Decomposition of the US Black/White inequality in life expectancy: Quantifying the impact of deaths of despair
Society for Epidemiologic Research Annual Meeting 2019: Minneapolis, MN
- Feb 2019
- Dec 2018
Blog: Quick look at NIH K-award funding
Motivated by a chat with Maria Glymour, I took a quick look at NIH K-award funding rates. It’s a very exploratory/descriptive look, but all the code is up on my GitHub. I’m hoping…
- Sep 2018
Paper: Trends in Black and White opioid mortality in the United States, 1979–2015
Epidemiology
Los Angeles Times, NBC, New York Times, NPR, and 7 more
- Jul 2018
Paper: Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria
New England Journal of Medicine
- Jun 2018
Blog: My Collaboration Network
My Twitter timeline is blowing up with #NetSci2018 tweets and awesome visualizations this week, so I was inspired to see if I can quickly make my own “gratuitous collaboration…
- Jun 2018
Blog: Our NEJM paper “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria”
Here is a non-exhaustive list of materials related to our new paper in New England Journal of Medicine, “ Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.” While I normally just…
- Jun 2018
Blog: Looking at opioid-related mortality, by race, 1979 to 2016
Our paper (with Monica Alexander and Magali Barbieri) is out now (in published ahead-of-print form). Monica has a great, short Twitter thread on the findings so if you don’t want…
- Apr 2018
Talk: A new platform for high density data collection in population health research
Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2018: Denver, CO
- Dec 2017
Blog: tldr; San Diego weather is better than Boston weather
I am taking a break from a crazy couple months of writing and coding by… writing code. Just a quick post comparing weather in Boston (where I am) to weather in San Diego (where…
- Nov 2017
Blog: Replacing decimal points with interpuncts in MS Word
It turns out Microsoft Word’s “Advanced Find and Replace” is quite… well, advanced. You can actually use regex to do relatively complex find and replace functions. For example…
- Nov 2017
- Oct 2017
Blog: Using R, Wikipedia, and SHERPA/RoMEO to show New England Journal of Medicine‘s pre-print statement is empirically false
One of the most fundamental aspects of collaborative research is sharing your work with others through pre-print or conference presentations. This isn’t likely to be news to…
- Jan 2017
- Jan 2017
Blog: Using a histogram as a legend in choropleths
Despite well known drawbacks, plotting parameters onto maps provides a convenient way of seeing context, patterns, and outliers. However, one of the many problems with choropleths…
- Jan 2017
- Dec 2016
Link: PSA: Applications are open for the 2017 Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship. 10/10 would do again.
I was a 2016 DSSG Fellow and it was a great experience.
- Nov 2016
Blog: Use bash to concatenate files in R
Often, I find I need to loop through directories full of csv files, sometimes tens of thousands of them, in order to combine them into a single analytical dataset I can use. When…
- Oct 2016
Blog: A visual tour of my publications
I recently came across this paper by Michal Brzezinski about (the lack of) power laws in citation distributions. It made me a little curious about the citations of my own articles…
- Sep 2016
Blog: Converting Slack’s Team Directory into virtual contact cards
I spent the summer as a fellow at University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good Fellowship (more on that later) where I got to work on optimizing EMS delivery in Cincinnati…
- May 2016
- Dec 2015
- Dec 2015
Paper: Police killings and police deaths are public health data and can be counted
PLOS Medicine
CNN, The Guardian, USA Today, Washington Post, and 5 more
- Aug 2015
Link: Reporter posts his mobile phone metadata for the public to analyze
With some cool visualizations as a bonus. Dataset link is at the bottom of the page.
- Jun 2015
Blog: The colon operator really is the fastest.
Way back when I was first learning R, I ran across an old listserv post that talked about how the colon (:) operator was the fastest way to generate a sequence. I never really…
- Mar 2015
Blog: New MetroCard rates and the dreaded “dead zone of change”
Yesterday, new MTA MetroCard rates went live in New York. I visit often enough that I thought I’d put together a little chart to figure out the best amount of money to put on my…
- Mar 2015
Blog: Boston’s brutal winter
Those of us in Boston just wrapped up an almost historic winter and it was particularly painful. Likely because we were lulled into a false sense of security by the (comparable)…
- Mar 2015
Blog: Waterfalls of Eligible Singles
As a Valentine’s Day (gag) gift to one of my friends, I created a Shiny app that will calculate the number of people in the United States who meet specified sex, age, marital…
- Aug 2014
Paper: Trends in US deaths due to legal intervention among black and white men, age 15–34 years, by county income level: 1960–2010
Harvard Public Health Review
- Aug 2014
Paper: 50-year trends in US socioeconomic inequalities in health: US-born Black and White Americans, 1959–2008
International Journal of Epidemiology
- Jul 2014
- Dec 2013
Blog: Shiny + deSolve = Interactive ODE Models
While taking a disease dynamics course, I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn how to use the Shiny package in R and create an interactive interface for some of my…
- Feb 2010