Welcome Ben Cooper – Manager of the Public Health Data & Training Center!
Ben’s role as the Center Manager at the Public Health Data & Training Center at the Institute for Public Health is to help develop and build public health data capacity, with a particular focus on health and social services data.
A St. Louis native, Ben has spent his entire career working with healthcare data in multiple capacities across a variety of settings, from academia to nonprofit to corporate managed care. He spent eight years as director of Research & Technology at Nurses for Newborns Foundation and nearly 10 years at Washington University in St. Louis in various roles ranging from statistical analyst, IRB member and Center Manager of the Public Health Data & Training Center at the Institute for Public Health.
Ben has extensive experience with program and outcomes evaluation, biostatistics, data visualization, data training and education. As an adjunct faculty at Washington University, he developed and taught graduate level courses on data management and statistical analysis. His unique background combination of information technology and nonprofit social services alongside formal training and experience in public health, statistics and academic research allow him to think about data from a population perspective, across communities by weaving in social determinants of health, to create maximum impact while maintaining the community voice. He holds a master’s degree in public health from Saint Louis University, with a joint concentration in biostatistics and epidemiology. When not thinking about data, Ben can often be found cooking, gardening, renovating an old house, riding his bike or somewhere in nature with his hyperactive black lab, Lucy.