Internships at Cooper/Smith
Cooper/Smith is committed to training and mentoring the next generation of global health and development leaders. We offer paid internships that support our global work and help students achieve their academic and personal goals.
Internships are developed on an ongoing basis as our programmatic and operational goals evolve. Internship opportunities are open to students around the world and may be available at any of our locations.
Our internships typically involve Master’s level students in Public Health, Global Development, Public Policy, Health Economics, Health Behavior, Epidemiology, Decision Science, Computer Science, Biostatistics, Data Science, Data Analytics. Most internships last around three months and currently run throughout the year.
Interns typically work on:
Statistical Model Development & Maintenance
Descriptive Statistics
Ad-hoc Analytics
Integration of Disparate Data Sources
Systematic Literature Reviews
Qualitative Data Analysis
Monitoring and Evaluations
Database Management
Open internships will be listed on this page as they arise.
If you are a university or other academic or research body and you are interested in partnering with Cooper/Smith to fund or support an internship, please write to us at contact@coopersmith.org. Interested students should also feel free to contact us for more information.
Intern Experiences
Summer 2020
This summer, Cooper/Smith hosted its first official internship with Canada’s McGill University, welcoming Deborah Chan and Nathali Gunawardena, MScPH candidates. The internship was facilitated in part by Mitacs, a non-profit that designs and delivers research and training programs throughout Canada.
Nathali and Deborah worked on four different projects during their summer internship:
Led a systematic review to identify HIV prevention strategies that have been deployed in Malawi. Their work culminated in a manuscript that is a candidate for publication.
Integrated publicly available datasets (mobility, case reporting, enacted policies) together to create a holistic picture of COVID-19 in select African countries. Their post featuring Kenya was featured on Medium’s coronavirus and data science coverage.
Conducted a two-part semi-structured literature review. The first review looked at previous ethical convenings on the use of novel data in public health.The second consisted of a deep dive into public health studies to understand whether ethics were considered when using novel data.
Validated an existing HIV prediction model based on the findings from a cross-sectional STI analysis and ran descriptive statistics using the country’s health management information system to understand if COVID-19 has caused essential service/medication disruption in Malawi.
Feature on Medium
Nathali and Deborah’s work was featured by Medium’s curators in their Data Science and Cor0navirus coverage.
“I love public health because it takes a holistic and equitable approach to understanding health and health systems. The methods that I’ve learned have really helped frame this approach to my work. There’s also something about a great team that elevates the work that you do. In addition to the technical and soft skills we learned during our internship, the environment at Cooper/Smith was conducive to learning and we were really supported as we branched into working with different team members and projects.”
“What I loved the most about Cooper/Smith was the staff. Everyone was so welcoming and the internship was highly organized. Our goals were clear from the start of the summer and Cooper/Smith really made sure that we participated in projects that addressed our learning needs. We got to participate in both qualitative and quantitative research and I really feel like we were able to contribute to projects that were meaningful and valuable. ”