Maria is a Research Scholar at the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab and a Master of Public Health in Global Health candidate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (class of ’23). She read economics in Greece, the UK, and Belgium, and earned her MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick in the UK.
She has over six years of experience working across the private and public sectors, and multilateral organisations, and has accumulated health policy experience across multiple countries. She has supported the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia with the design and implementation of a new model of care, with the key objective to move from a hospital-centric system to one emphasizing prevention and enabling results-based financing by conducting cost-benefit analyses, costing and budget impact analyses, and training government officials in the use of health technology assessment approaches for priority setting. As a health economist for Public Health England, she led the economic case for investment in the newly established UK Health Security Agency, receiving multiple awards for her leadership. Currently she is researching the barriers to effective development and implementation of AMR policies in Greece for a report for the European Commission. At the HSIL, she is contributing to a systematic review on the global economic cost of cardiovascular disease.
Maria is interested in health systems strengthening, in particular building the local technical and institutional capacity to engender evidence-based decisions surrounding the allocation of funds for health, and exploring how innovative health financing structures, like social impact bonds and volume guarantees, can be deployed to advance universal health coverage in resource-limited settings, all with the aim to advance the sustainability of health systems and improve people’s lives at scale.