Jessie Pinchoff

Jessie Pinchoff is an associate at the Population Council and also serves as co-lead of the Council’s Population, Environmental Risks, and the Climate Crisis (PERCC) initiative. In this role, she provides strategic input to climate change–related work across Council offices and guides the Council’s work in examining critical intersections between climate and health.

Pinchoff’s research interests include spatial statistics, survey methodology, and the interactions between environment and health. She has carried out research related to the geographic distribution and variation in infectious disease risk, and is interested in how communities can build resilience and protect against disease in a changing climate and rapidly urbanizing context. She uses satellite imagery and remotely sensed data to better define environmental shocks and stresses, and develops analyses to measure how the environment impacts health, migration, and adaptive capacity in vulnerable populations.

Prior to the Council, Pinchoff was an associate researcher at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) working as a principal investigator on randomized controlled trials and M&E related to public health. She lived in Zambia for two years studying malaria transmission dynamics, working on projects to design novel strategies to better target indoor residual spraying campaigns, use spatial data to compare surveillance strategies for malaria elimination, and build predictive models linking the distribution of malaria vectors, human infections, and environmental features.

Pinchoff earned her BA in anthropology and global health from Northwestern University, an MPH in epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and a PhD in global disease epidemiology and control from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.