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Emily R Smith

Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine
Emergency Medicine
310 Trent Drive, Room 302, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Emily Smith, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Duke University with research interests including children’s global surgery, poverty metrics, health economics, and global health policy. As an epidemiologist, she has worked with her in-country partners at the Edna Adan Hospital in Somaliland for the past 5 years on projects related to children’s surgical care, including defining the epidemiologic burden, assessing poverty trajectories among families with a child’s surgical need, geospatial analyses, and healthcare infrastructure. Prior to DGHI, her work at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) involved utilizing epidemiological methods, mathematical modeling techniques and cost-effectiveness research to determine effectiveness of various testing strategies among HIV exposed infants in sub-Saharan Africa.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine · 2025 - Present Emergency Medicine, Clinical Science Departments
Associate Research Professor of Global Health · 2025 - Present Duke Global Health Institute, University Institutes and Centers
Member of the Duke Cancer Institute · 2025 - Present Duke Cancer Institute, Institutes and Centers

In the News


Published October 26, 2023
Good Reads for the Fall: New Books From Duke Authors
Published October 23, 2023
DGHI's Emily Smith Asks What It Means to Love Your Neighbor
Published March 4, 2021
Moms on a Mission. These moms work as doctor and scientists. But they’ve also taken on another job: Fighting COVID-19 misinformation online.

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Recent Publications


Indexing Healthcare Access and Quality for Surgically Amenable Causes of Death: A Global Analysis of 204 Countries and Territories in 2019.

Journal Article World J Surg · December 2025 BACKGROUND: We analyzed the healthcare access and quality (HAQ) index for surgically amenable causes, its progress since 1990, and the gap compared to non-surgical HAQ across 204 countries and territories in 2019 for children (up to 14 years) and overall p ... Full text Link to item Cite

Family decision-making during access to surgical care for children: A qualitative analysis and conceptual framework.

Journal Article J Pediatr Surg · November 27, 2025 AIMS: How family decisions impact access to surgical care for children remains poorly understood. Our aims were to examine family decision-making during access to surgical care for children with appendicitis and to derive a novel conceptual model of how fa ... Full text Link to item Cite

Delayed primary surgery and outcomes in children with gastrointestinal anomalies in 264 hospitals and 74 countries.

Journal Article Am J Epidemiol · November 4, 2025 The impact of delayed presentation to primary surgery on mortality and complication outcomes in children with gastrointestinal congenital anomalies is poorly understood. Using a cohort of 3767 children with gastrointestinal anomalies in 74 countries (2018- ... Full text Link to item Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill · 2016 Ph.D.
University of South Carolina, Columbia · 2006 M.S.P.H.
Wayland Baptist University · 2003 B.S.