panelist biographies
Rifat Atun 
is Professor of International Health Management at the Business School and the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. He is Head of The Health Management Group at Imperial College Business School. His research focuses on health systems reform, innovation in the life sciences, and diffusion of innovations in health systems. He has published widely in these areas. Between 2008 and 2012 he was a member of the Executive Management Team of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Switzerland as the Director of the Strategy, Performance and Evaluation Cluster. He is Chair of the Stop TB Partnership Coordinating Board. Dr. Atun has worked at the UK Department for International Development Health Systems Resource Centre and has acted as a consultant for the World Bank, World Health Organization, and a number of international agencies on the design, implementation and evaluation of health systems reforms. Dr. Atun has served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the WHO Research Centre for Health Development in Japan. He is a member of the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board and the UK Medical Research Council’s Global Health Group. He is also a member of the Global Task Force on Expanded Access to Cancer Care and Control in Developing Countries. Dr. Atun studied medicine at University of London as a Commonwealth Scholar and subsequently completed his postgraduate medical studies and Masters in business administration at University of London and Imperial College London. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians (UK), a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK), and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (UK).
Till Bärnighausenis Associate Professor of Global Health at the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Prof. Bärnighausen works on the population health, economic, social and behavioral impacts of global health interventions, in particular HIV treatment and prevention, and on the organization of health systems in developing countries. He is a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Prof. Bärnighausen has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and many book chapters. His research is interdisciplinary, incorporating theoretical and methodological insights from public health, medicine, economics, epidemiology, the management sciences and demography. He is joint PI on NIH/NICHD grant R01 HD058482-01 (Understanding causal pathways of HIV acquisition and transmission), co-investigator on NIH/NMH 1R01MH083539-01 (The impact of antiretroviral therapy on HIV epidemic dynamics), and co-investigator of the Wellcome-Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (Africa Centre). His research has also been funded by the European Commission, World Bank, WHO, UNAIDS, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, IDRC Canada, DADD Germany, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Rush Foundation, GAVI Alliance, DFID, and Harvard University. Prof. Bärnighausen has previously worked as senior associate for McKinsey & Co, as HIV Epidemiologist and Senior Epidemiologist at the Africa Centre, and as Associate Professor of Population Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Health Systems at Tongji Medical University in Wuhan, China; and he served as Senior Integrated Expert in South Africa for the Center for International Migration, GIZ, Germany. He is a medical specialist in Family Medicine and holds doctoral degrees in International Health (HSPH) and History of Medicine (University of Heidelberg), as well as master degrees in Health Systems Management (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Financial Economics (SOAS, University of London).
Peter Berman is Professor of the Practice of Global Health Systems and Economics and Director of Education in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a health economist with more than thirty years of experience in research, policy analysis and development, and training and education in global health. Today he is leading new research programs to develop effective primary care systems in Ethiopia and working on strategies to make health care financing more effective. He heads the HSPH master’s of public health global health concentration. He taught at HSPH from 1991-2004 at which time he joined the World Bank. While with the World Bank, Dr. Berman was Lead Health Economist in the New Delhi office (2004-08) and in the HNP anchor department as Practice Leader for the World Bank’s Health Systems Global Expert Team (2008-2011). From 1991-2004, Dr. Berman was Professor of the Practice of Population and International Health Economics, the founding director of the International Health Systems Program, and Principal Investigator for two global projects at Harvard: The Data for Decision Making Project, a USAID cooperative agreement which Dr. Berman directed, and The Partnerships for Health Reform, as sub-contractor to Abt Associates. He also led a multi-year study to develop National Health Accounts with the Government of Turkey and numerous other international research collaborations. Dr. Berman has been co-director of the HSPH-World Bank Institute Flagship Global Core Course on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing and directed HSPH’s executive education programs in Public-Private Partnerships and National Health Accounts. He is author and editor of five books on global health economics and numerous academic papers. Dr. Berman holds an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Theresa S. Betancourt is Associate Professor of Child Health and Human Rights in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health and directs the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA) at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. Her central research interests include the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children and families, resilience and protective processes in child and adolescent mental health and applied cross-cultural mental health research. She has extensive experience in conducting research among children and families in low resource settings particularly in the context of humanitarian emergencies. She is the Principal Investigator of a prospective longitudinal study of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone and is developing and evaluating a Family Strengthening Intervention for HIV-affected children and families in Rwanda. Previously, Dr. Betancourt worked as a mental health clinician in both school and community settings and consulted on global children’s mental health issues for various international NGOs and United Nations agencies. She has written extensively on mental health and resilience in children facing adversity including recent articles in Child Development, The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Social Science and Medicine and PLOS One. Dr. Betancourt received her M.A. from the University of Louisville and Sc.D. from Harvard School of Public Health.
Robert E. Black is the Edgar Berman Professor and Chair of the Department of International Health and Director of the Institute for International Programs of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Black is trained in medicine, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He has served as a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and worked at institutions in Bangladesh and Peru on research related to childhood infectious diseases and nutritional problems. Dr. Black’s current research includes field trials of vaccines, micronutrients and other nutritional interventions, effectiveness studies of health programs, such as the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness and Integrated Community Case Management approaches for treatment of serious childhood diseases, and evaluation of preventive and curative health service programs in low- and middle-income countries.
Barry R. Bloom is Harvard University’s Distinguished Service Professor of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. He received a bachelor’s degree and an honorary ScD from Amherst College, and a PhD from Rockefeller University. Dr. Bloom is widely recognized for his work in the area of infectious diseases, vaccines, and global health. He has made important discoveries in immunity to tuberculosis and leprosy. He served as a consultant to the White House on International Health Policy from 1977 to 1978, was elected President of the American Association of Immunologists, and served as President of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Bloom was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. . He has received numerous awards for his scientific work including the first Bristol-Myers Award in Infectious Diseases, Robert Koch Gold Medal, and the Novartis Award in Immunology. He has been extensively involved with the World Health Organization (WHO) for more than 40 years. He was a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research and chaired the WHO Committees on Leprosy Research and Tuberculosis Research, and chaired the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. He as served on the National Advisory Councils of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, and the Center for Infectious Diseases of the CDC and currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Fogarty International Center at NIH. He was elected to membership of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
David E. Bloom is Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Bloom served for 10 years as Chairman of HSPH’s Department of Global Health and Population. He is currently faculty director of Harvard’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has published more than 350 articles, book chapters, and books in the fields of economics, health, and demography and has been honored with a number of distinctions, including election as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Bloom is an Adjunct Trustee of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, a member of the Board of Directors of PSI, and a member of the Board of JSI (R&T). Bloom also serves as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Health Advisory Board and is Chair of its Global Agenda Council on Education and Skill. Bloom received a BSc in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1976, an MA in Economics from Princeton University in 1978, and a PhD in Economics and Demography from Princeton University in 1981. Bloom has been Assistant Professor of Economics at Carnegie-Mellon; Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard; Professor and Chairman of Economics at Columbia; and Deputy Director of the Harvard Institute of International Development. Bloom is co-Editor of the Journal of the Economics of Population Ageing, and a member of the Book Review Board of Science.
Kenneth H. Brown is Distinguished Professor, Department of Nutrition, University of California, Davis. Dr. Brown is a pediatrician and nutritionist who received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Brown’s research addresses the causes, complications, treatment, and prevention of childhood malnutrition in lower-income countries, focusing primarily on issues of infant and young child feeding, relationships between infection and nutrition, and control of specific micronutrient deficiencies, including zinc, iron and vitamin A. Dr. Brown is the Chair of the International Zinc Nutrition Consultative Group; and he has served on expert committees of the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, UNICEF and the US Institute of Medicine, and on the editorial boards of several major nutrition journals. He is a past-President of the Society for International Nutrition Research and a Fellow of the American Society of Nutrition. His accomplishments have been recognized through the Kellogg Award for International Nutrition Research, the McCollum Award, the Rainer Gross Award, and the Prince Mahidol Award.
David Canning is the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and Professor of Economics and International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge University and is currently deputy director of the Program on the Global Demography of Aging. He also heads the economics track of the doctoral program in Population and International Health. Before assuming his role at the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Canning held faculty positions at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, Columbia University, and Queen’s University Belfast, where he received his B.A. in economics and mathematics in 1979. In addition, Dr. Canning has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. He was also a member of Working Group One of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. Dr. Canning’s research on demographic change focuses on the effect of changes in age structure on aggregate economic activity, and the effect of changes in longevity on economic behavior. The research also focuses on health as a form of human capital and its affect on worker productivity.
Marcia Castro is Associate Professor of Demography in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, and Associate Faculty of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. The core of her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches, combining data from different sources, to identify the determinants of malaria transmission in different ecological settings, providing evidence for the improvement of current control policies, as well as the development of new ones. Other areas of research include expansion of the Brazilian Amazon frontier and the impacts of large-scale development projects implemented in the region; use of spatial analysis in the Social Sciences; population dynamics and mortality models; population displacement associated with development projects and climate change; and modeling the impact of extreme climatic events on the transmission of malaria in the Amazon. Castro has applied geographical information systems, remote sensing, and spatial statistics to her research, as well as proposed novel methods in spatial analysis. She has more than 12 years of experience in malaria research in the Brazilian Amazon, and recently initiated new collaborations to assess the impact of human mobility and asymptomatic infections in the pattern and level of malaria transmission. She is planning a birth cohort study in a malaria endemic area in the Amazon, which will be launched in 2014. She has expertise in urban malaria in Africa, where she worked with the Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) Urban Malaria Control Program between 2004-2010, and implemented a pilot community-based environmental management intervention. Using the Dar es Salaam data, she is working on a project to develop a space-time disease mapping approach to evaluate disease control interventions, accommodating the use of longitudinal information combined with cross-sectional data. Castro earned her Ph.D. in Demography from Princeton University.
Lincoln C. Chen is President of the China Medical Board. Started in 1914, the Board was endowed by John D. Rockefeller as an independent American foundation to advance health in China and Asia by strengthening medical education, research, and policies. Dr. Chen was the founding director of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative (2001-2006), and in an earlier decade, the Taro Takemi Professor of International Health and Director of the University-wide Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (1987-1996). In 1997-2001, Dr. Chen served as Executive Vice-President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1973-1987, he represented the Ford Foundation in India and Bangladesh. In 2008, Dr. Chen assumed the Chair of the Board of BRAC USA, having completed two terms as Chair of the Board of CARE/USA in 2007. He serves as Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee to the FXB Center on Health and Human Rights at Harvard. Dr. Chen also serves on the Board of the Social Science Research Council, the Institute of Metrics and Evaluation (University of Washington), the Public Health Foundation of India, and the UN Fund for International Partnership (counterpart to UN Foundation). He was the Special Envoy of the WHO Director-General in Human Resources for Health (2004-2007), and the Founding Chair of the Global Health Workforce Alliance (2006-2008). Dr. Chen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a member of the Harvard School of Public Health Visiting Committee. He graduated from Princeton University (BA), Harvard Medical School (MD), and the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (MPH).
Jessica Lee Cohen is Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Burke Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute and Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development. She has conducted a number of randomized-controlled field trials in Africa related to appropriate treatment for malaria, technology adoption, behavior change messaging and pharmaceutical supply chains, including: whether subsidies for over-the-counter malaria tests in African pharmacies can be used to encourage adoption of the tests and reduce overtreatment with malaria medicine; the impact of package design and messaging of antimalarials on treatment compliance; whether financial incentives to wholesalers can improve pharmaceutical supply chains to remote areas of Tanzania; and the role of beliefs about malaria prevalence and of targeted messaging/behavior change campaigns on consumer demand for malaria testing and supplier pricing. Dr. Cohen is co-editor (with William Easterly) of the book “What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small.” She also has conducted research on financing vehicles to reduce aid volatility and the feasibility of malaria elimination. Other on-going work includes a randomized trial exploring the role of financial vehicles (such as savings accounts and insurance mechanisms) to encourage safe delivery and post-natal care in urban Kenya. Dr. Cohen’s work has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, Malaria Journal, PLoS One and the Lancet. Her work has been referenced in media such as the Economist, the Boston Globe, New York Times and Nature. She has advised the government of Zanzibar on its malaria control program and the Canadian International Development Agency on its child survival programs. Dr. Cohen received her bachelor’s degree in economics from Wesleyan University and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at MIT, where she received her doctorate in economics.
Goodarz Danaei is Assistant Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population, at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Danaei’s global health research focuses on estimating the effect of risk factors and preventive interventions on non-communicable disease incidence and mortality at the population level with a focus on developing countries and economies in transition. This research uses empirical evidence on risk factor distributions from population health surveys and evidence on effect sizes from epidemiological studies. Developing methods that can improve the consistency and comparability of data sources and analytical methods across multiple risk factors is a major focus of Dr. Danaei’s research in this area. Dr. Danaei is extending these methods to analysis of joint effects of multiple risk factors which should incorporate issues of risk factor correlation and interactions. Another part of this research attempts to evaluate the role of risk factors on health disparities within or across countries and to estimate the potential impact of population-level preventive interventions on health disparities. Dr. Danaei’s epidemiological research applies advanced methods of causal inference to questions of comparative effectiveness research from observational data in the context of cardiovascular diseases and other non-communicable diseases. These research projects are conducted in collaboration with the faculty and researchers from the Program in Causal Inference.
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health and policy evaluation. Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (with Abhijit Banerjee) for “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty” (2011), the David N. Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (2011), a John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist under 40 (2010), a MacArthur Fellowship (2009) and the American Economic Association’s Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003). Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and is Director of the Center of Economic Policy Research’s development economics program. She serves as the founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Majid Ezzati is the Chair in Global Environmental Health at Imperial College London and leads the Environment and Global Health Research Group. His research focuses on exposure to and health effects of environmental, behavioral, nutritional, and metabolic risk factors and their interventions, with emphasis on health inequalities. Ezzati and his research group have conducted a number of large field studies on household fuel use, air pollution and health in Kenya, Ghana, The Gambia, and China. Recent and ongoing research has focused on testing alternative fuel-stove interventions for household air pollution under actual conditions of use; on the variations and sources of air pollution in urban neighbourhoods; and on modelling the future health benefits of air pollution interventions for infectious and non-communicable diseases. Ezzati led the World Health Organization’s Comparative Risk Assessment Project which appeared in the World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life and the Comparative Risk Assessment component of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study. He leads the Global Burden of Metabolic Risk Factors for Chronic Diseases, which made the first-ever consistent and comparable estimates of trends in major cardio-metabolic risks for all countries in the world.
Wafaie Fawzi is Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology and Global Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his medical training at the University of Khartoum, Sudan and his Doctorate of Public Health in 1992 in the Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. He has experience in the design and implementation of randomized controlled trials and observational epidemiologic studies of perinatal health and infectious diseases, with emphasis on nutritional factors. These include examining the epidemiology of adverse pregnancy outcomes, childhood infections, and HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria among populations in Tanzania, India and other developing countries. Dr. Fawzi is also a Principal Investigator of the MDH HIV/AIDS Care and Treatment Program in Tanzania, which provides for scaling up quality care and treatment services and building operational research capacity. He is a founding member of the Africa Academy of Public Health, a Harvard affiliated organization that aims to train future public health leaders and build strong research collaborations with partners in Africa.
Günther Fink is Assistant Professor of International Health Economics at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. He received a B.A. in International Economic Sciences from the University of Innsbruck in 1997, a master’s degree in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Bocconi University, Italy, in 2006. Dr. Fink was a post-doctoral fellow with the Program on the Global Demography of Aging (PGDA), Harvard University, from 2006 to 2007, and joined the Department for Global Health and Population at the School of Public Health in 2008. Dr. Fink’s research has covered a wide range of topics related to economic development, with a particular focus on the interactions between health, human capital and individual well-being. His work has relied on large number of publicly available data sets such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), as well as on primary data collected through this own projects in Burkina Faso, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia. His research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Economic Growth, the European Economic Review, the International Journal of Epidemiology, and Science.
Jeffrey S. Flier was named the 21st Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University on July 11, 2007. Flier, an endocrinologist and an authority on the molecular causes of obesity and diabetes, is also the Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously he had served as Harvard Medical School Faculty Dean for Academic Programs and Chief Academic Officer for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard teaching affiliate. Dr. Flier is one of the country’s leading investigators in the areas of obesity and diabetes. His research has produced major insights into the molecular mechanism of insulin action, the molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance in human disease, and the molecular pathophysiology of obesity. Dr. Flier received a BS from City College of New York in 1968, and an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1972, graduating with the Elster Award for Highest Academic Standing. Following residency training in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital from 1972 to 1974, Dr. Flier moved to the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate. In 1978, he joined the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, serving as Chief of the Diabetes Unit at Beth Israel Hospital until 1990, when he was named chief of the hospital’s Endocrine Division. In 2002, Dr. Flier was named Chief Academic Officer of BIDMC, a newly created senior position responsible for research and academic programs. In 2005, he received the Banting Medal from the American Diabetes Association, its highest scientific honor.
Julio Frenk is Dean of the Faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health and T & G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development, a joint appointment with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Frenk served as the Minister of Health of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, where he introduced universal health coverage. He was the founding director of the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico and has also held leadership positions at the Mexican Health Foundation, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carso Health Institute. Dr. Frenk holds a medical degree from the National University of Mexico, as well as a Masters of Public Health and a joint doctorate in Medical Care Organization and in Sociology from the University of Michigan. He has been awarded three honorary doctorates. He is a member of the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine of Mexico. His written production comprises 33 books and monographs, 63 book chapters, 130 articles in academic and professional journals, and 117 articles in cultural periodicals and newspapers. Two of his books are best-selling novels for youngsters explaining the functions of the human body. In September of 2008, Dr. Frenk received the Clinton Global Citizen Award for changing “the way practitioners and policy makers across the world think about health.”
Sue Goldie is the Roger Lee Irving Professor of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Faculty Director of the university-wide Harvard Global Health Institute, and Director of the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard School of Public Health. Trained as a physician, decision scientist, and public health researcher, Dr. Goldie has dedicated her career to improving the health of vulnerable populations, generating evidence-based policies to reduce health inequities, and building bridges between disciplines to tackle global health challenges. A MacArthur award recipient (2005-2010), she is renowned for applying the tools of decision science to public health, focusing on viruses of global importance and women’s health. Dr. Goldie has published more than 200 scientific papers and technical reports, and has been Principal Investigator on awards from the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has served on several national and international advisory boards, ranging from the World Health Organization to the Board on Global Health in the Institute of Medicine, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. A champion of interdisciplinary research and teaching, she received theJohn Eisenberg Award for translation of research to practice, the Harvard University Everett Mendelsohn Mentoring Award, mentorship awards from Harvard School of Public Health, and more than a dozen citations for teaching excellence. She teaches RDS 280 (Decision Science for Public Health) at the School of Public Health, SW24 (Global Health Challenges) at Harvard College, and serves on the FAS Standing Committees for the university-wide PhD Program in Health Policy and secondary field in Global Health and Health Policy at the College.
Howard Hiatt is a Harvard-trained physician, former physician-in-chief at the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Hospital, former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, and one of the organizers of the Global Health Equity Division of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Hiatt has defined health and health care in very broad terms. During his tenure as Dean, he increased and broadened work in the quantitative analytic sciences, introduced molecular and cell biology into the School’s research and teaching, and created its program in health policy and management – the first in a public health school. He later served as secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and organized and directed the Academy’s Initiatives for Children program. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he helped develop the research training Program in Clinical Effectiveness, which is now sponsored by the School of Public Health. He helped organize and is now Associate Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham and Professor of Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Calestous Juma is Professor of the Practice of International Development and Director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project. He directs the Agricultural Innovation in Africa Project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and serves as Faculty Chair of Innovation for Economic Development executive program. Dr. Juma is a former Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and Founding Director of the African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi. He is co-chair of the African Union’s High-Level Panel on Science, Technology and Innovation and a jury member of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He was Chancellor of the University of Guyana and has been elected to several scientific academies including the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Sciences, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and the African Academy of Sciences. He has won several international awards for his work on sustainable development. He holds a doctorate in science and technology policy studies and has written widely on science, technology, and environment.
Ana Langer joined the Harvard School of Public Health in July 2010 as a Professor of the Practice of Public Health (Department of Global Health and Population), and director of the Women and Health Initiative and Maternal Health Task Force. Dr. Langer, a physician specializing in pediatrics and neonatology and a reproductive health expert, is respected worldwide as a leader in using research findings to influence policy and improve the overall quality of health care for women and families. Dr. Langer has conducted research and published extensively on maternal mortality; psychosocial support during pregnancy, labor, and the post-partum period; quality of maternal health care; unsafe abortion; emergency contraception; the introduction of evidence-based practices in maternal health services; and strategies to reinforce the reproductive health component in health sector reform programs in developing countries. Before joining the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Langer was president and CEO of EngenderHealth (2005-2010), an international not-for-profit organization. Based in Mexico, Dr. Langer was the Population Council’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1994-2005. Previously, she was the chair of the Department of Research in Women and Children’s Health for the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico (1988-1994), where she lead clinical trials and other research projects, and established the first master’s program in reproductive health in Latin America.
Margaret Anne McConnell is Assistant Professor of Global Health Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her current research combines behavioral economics with field and laboratory experiments to understand and evaluate policies designed to change health and savings behavior. She is currently working on a number of field trials in Africa and Latin America related to messaging and behavior change, the formation of price expectations for health goods and the design of savings products and their impacts on health and health spending. Professor McConnell received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology, located in Pasenda, California.
Jonathan Quick, a family physician and health management specialist, is the President and CEO of Management Sciences for Health (MSH), a non-profit global health consultancy working to develop local health leadership and sustainable local health systems in over 60 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. He was director of Essential Drugs and Medicines Policy at the World Health Organization from 1996 to 2004. Prior to that he served with MSH as founding director of the MSH center for pharmaceutical management, health systems advisor with the Afghanistan Health Sector Support Project and the Kenya Health Care Financing Project. Dr. Quick has carried out assignments in over 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Boston University School of Public Health, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and an honors graduate of Harvard College and the University of Rochester Medical School.
Michael R. Reich is Taro Takemi Professor of International Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1981 and has served on the Harvard faculty since 1983. Dr. Reich has written extensively about the political dimensions of public health policy, health reform, and pharmaceutical policy. His current interests include access to medicines and pharmaceutical policy, health system strengthening, and the political economy of policy-making processes. Dr. Reich has worked on health systems issues with colleagues at Harvard for two decades, and serves as a core faculty member for the World Bank Flagship Course on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing. His recent books include Getting Health Reform Right: A Guide to Improving Performance and Equity (by M.J. Roberts, W. Hsiao, P. Berman, and M.R. Reich, Oxford, 2004), and Access: How Do Good Health Technologies Get to Poor People in Poor Countries? (by L.J. Frost and M.R. Reich, Harvard, 2008). He leads the doctoral program on health systems (with an emphasis on political economy analysis) for the Department of Global Health and Population. He previously served as chair and acting chair of the Department of Population and International Health (1997-2001) and as director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (2001-05), and continues as director of the Takemi Program in International Health.
Jaime Sepulveda is the Executive Director of UCSF Global Health Sciences, and Professor of Epidemiology, at the University of California in San Francisco. From 2007 to 2011, Dr. Sepulveda was a member of the Foundation Leadership Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He served at the BMGF in various roles: as Director of Integrated Health Solutions, Director of Special Initiatives and Senior Fellow in the Global Health Program. He also served as a deputy to the Global Health President, Dr. Tachi Yamada, and played a central role in shaping the foundation’s overall global health strategy as part of its executive team. Dr. Sepulveda worked closely with key foundation partners—including the GAVI Alliance, where he chaired the Executive Committee—to increase access to vaccines and other effective health solutions in developing countries. In that capacity, he contributed to improve the governance and management of the organization. Dr. Sepulveda played an important role in raising $4.3 billion USD in the GAVI pledging conference in London on June 2011. Sepulveda worked for more than 20 years in a variety of senior health posts in the Mexican government. After graduating from Harvard University where he obtained his Doctorate, he became Mexico’s Director-General of Epidemiology. At age 36, he was appointed Vice-Minister of Health. From 2003 to 2006, he served as Director of the National Institutes of Health of Mexico. He was for almost a decade Director-General of Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health and Dean of the National School of Public Health. In addition to his research credentials, Sepulveda is an experienced implementer of effective health programs. Sepulveda designed Mexico’s Universal Vaccination Program, which eliminated polio, measles, and diphtheria by achieving universal childhood immunization coverage. He also modernized the national health surveillance system, created the National Health Surveys System and founded Mexico’s National AIDS Council. Sepulveda holds a medical degree from National Autonomous University of Mexico and two Masters and a Doctorate degree from Harvard University. In 1997, he was awarded the Harvard’s Alumni Award of Merit. Dr. Sepulveda was elected to and served in the Harvard Board of Overseers (2002-2008). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Walter Willett is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Willett, studied food science at Michigan State University, and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School before obtaining a Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Willett has focused much of his work over the last 25 years on the development of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases. He has applied these methods starting in 1980 in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Together, these cohorts that include nearly 300,000 men and women with repeated dietary assessments are providing the most detailed information on the long-term health consequences of food choices. Dr. Willett is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of many national and international awards for his research.
Michelle Williams is the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). She is also Professor of Global Health and Population at HSPH. Previously a Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health, Dr. Williams has a longstanding relationship with the HSPH Department of Epidemiology from which she received her doctorate in 1991. Dr. Williams is focused principally, but not exclusively, in the field of reproductive and perinatal epidemiology. She has spent the last two decades focused on integrating epidemiological, biological and molecular approaches into rigorously designed clinical epidemiology research projects that have led to greater understandings of the etiology and pathophysiology of placental abruption, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia. Her research programs were developed through: (1) identifying gaps in the literature; (2) constructing methodologically rigorous, versatile and robust epidemiological data capture systems and networks (epidemiology platforms) in North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and South America; and (3) proactively and strategically integrating biochemical and molecular biomarkers onto that epidemiology platform. She has fully exploited the arsenal of epidemiology study designs (case-control, self-matched case-crossover, and prospective cohort studies) to answer important questions concerning the etiology and pathophysiology of a relatively broad spectrum of adverse reproductive and perinatal outcomes. Dr. Williams has published more than 280 scientific articles and has received numerous research and teaching awards, including the American Public Health Association’s Abraham Lilienfeld Award. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented Dr. Williams with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.
Winnie Yip is Professor of Health Policy and Economics at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, where she co-directs the Global Health Policy Program. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Yip received her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Her research interests include incentives and provider behavior; design and impact evaluation of health care systems; and financing and delivery of cost-effective health interventions. She leads several large-scale social experiments in health care financing and delivery in China and her work has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Union Commission, the Economics and Social Science Research Council. She leads the Health Systems Strengthening and Sustainable Financing cluster of the Asia Network for Health System Strengthening, is a member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), Thematic Group on Health for All, and a member of the Expert Group on Provider Payment Mechanisms of the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage. She has acted as consultant to the World Bank, WHO and other international agencies. Professor Yip is Associate Editor of Health Economics (Wiley), and the Journal of the Economics of Ageing (Elsevier), and editorial board member of Health Policy, Health Economics, Policy and Law (Cambridge University Press) and Health Economics Review (Springer).