Ben Balding serves as a Research Specialist within the Health Affairs Institute. In this role, Ben provides research support and outreach services on both the Mountain State Assessment of Trends in Community Health (MATCH) and the Children’s Mental Health Evaluation (CMHE) projects. Ben applies research and evaluation skills, which include tasks such as literature reviews, drafting deliverable reports, project outreach activities, data visualizations, and survey administration/facilitation duties, just to name a few.
Prior to joining the Health Affairs team, Ben worked with various state agencies with an emphasis on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) programs and business research/evaluation activities for the West Virginia Department of Economic Development for more than 14 years. In addition, he served as the West Virginia Census Bureau Liaison to the Governor’s Office for more than six years, tasked with collecting and analyzing demographic datasets used for several federal-state community grant programs, which dovetail with population health and public health surveillance initiatives.