Kevin Croke, Ph.D., is the Director of the International Health Systems Program and an assistant professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also an assistant editor for health policy at Social Science and Medicine and a faculty affiliate of the HKS Center for International Development and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. His research focuses on the politics of health and health systems and on the evaluation of large-scale health programs and policies. He has worked on health system research and policy in multiple countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, and his research has been published in leading journals of political science, global health, and development economics. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Diana Bowser, Sc.D., M. P. H., is the Course Director for Global Executive Courses within the International Health Systems Program and has her primary academic appointment at Boston College as the Associate Dean for Research and Integrated Science at the Connell School of Nursing. She has 20 years of experience in health system analysis related to health economics, health policy, and using econometric methods to evaluate health system changes in Latin America, Africa, and the United States. She has provided technical assistance and conducted research with funding from USAID, DFID, WHO, the Global Fund, Save the Children, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IADB, NIH, and the World Bank. She has worked closely with the following governments on these policy issues: Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, Swaziland, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Ukraine, Kosovo, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Dr. Bowser earned her BA from Harvard College, her MPH from Yale School of Public Health, and her Doctor of Science in health economics from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is fluent in Spanish and has lived in Latin America.
Sonja Luvara, M.B.A, M.P.P. M.L.A is the Program Manager of the International Health Systems Program in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She manages the international executive education courses for the program. She has worked both domestically in higher education as well as in South Africa and Egypt. She earned her M.P.P and M.B.A from The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandies University and her B.A. in International Affairs from Northeastern University.
Lu Malygina, M.A. is the Program Coordinator of the International Health Systems Program in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She studied Medicine and Public Health in Moscow, Russia, then got her Master’s in Health Communication from Tufts University. Before joining IHSP, Lu worked at Zus Health, a health tech startup in Boston, and was an Administrative Assistant in the Nutritional Immunology Lab at Tufts University.
Affiliated Faculty and Experts
Thomas J. Bossert, Ph.D., Emeritus is the previous Director of the International Health Systems Program of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He has many years of experience in international health in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. His specialties include health reform, decentralization, sustainability and transition, implementation science, social capital, human resources strategic planning and political feasibility analysis. His publications have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Health Policy and Planning, WHO Bulletin, The Lancet among other journals and monographs. His innovative “decision space” approach to decentralization has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals and recently in an edited book on decentralization: Federalism and Decentralization in Health Care: A Decision Space Approach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. He has developed a guide to strategic planning for human resources for WHO. His pioneering work on the sustainability of donor-funded projects was published in Social Science and Medicine in 1990, and he has recently studied sustainability and transition for projects funded by CDC and the Gates Foundation. He has provided technical assistance and conducted research and project management for contracts with various donors, including USAID, DfID, World Bank, WHO and the Inter-American Development Bank. At Harvard, he teaches courses on health system reform and political economy of health systems and was the recipient of a Teaching Citation Award based on student evaluations for the academic year 2013-14. He also teaches in the Harvard/World Bank Flagship Course on Health System Strengthening in Washington and in various countries around the world. He also teaches executive training courses on decentralization and human resources for the International Health Systems Program at Harvard and for country courses worldwide. Dr. Bossert earned his A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (view full profile).
David Javitch, Ph.D., is an organizational psychologist, leadership specialist, and president of Javitch Associates in Newton (www.javitch.com), Massachusetts. A former French teacher, he maintains an active national and international individual and organizational assessment, training and consultation practice. As a faculty member at Harvard University and now retired from Boston University, Javitch teaches management courses to graduate students and industry executives. He was named Most Inspirational Instructor by The Harvard School of Public Health as well as receiving the “Excellence in Teaching” award. He received the “Excellence in Teaching” award at Boston University six times. Javitch has been a Visiting Professor at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the past, he worked for the European Union as a trainer and consultant to the health care reform movement. He has also consulted and presented intensive training courses in South Africa, as well as Ethiopia, India, and elsewhere. As a specialist in organizational issues, he combines field-proven managerial and psychological methods to enable individuals, teams, and departments to achieve and continually ensure organizational success.
Javitch has been a nationally recognized seminar management speaker for the American Management Association and for Dun and Bradstreet’s Business Education Services Foundation. He has written three books: Task Force/Project Management; A Guide to Managers on the Line, describes key traits and characteristics that lead to achievement in successful employees; How to Achieve Power in a Power Driven Society: a 5-Step Approach, a popular management book geared toward leaders facing the challenges of the 21st century, and recently published MBA for Health Care. Bloodties, a contemporary novel about success and interpersonal relationships is in revision. (view full profile)
Michael Reich, Ph.D., is Taro Takemi Research Professor of International Health Policy in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research interests include health system strengthening and reform, access to medicines and pharmaceutical policy, and the political economy of policy-making processes. Reich has worked on health systems issues with colleagues at Harvard for over two decades, and is faculty director of the World Bank Flagship Course on Health Systems Strengthening and Sustainable Financing. As part of this collaboration, he coauthored a landmark book on health systems, 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). He is also founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Health Systems & Reform, whose first issue was published in January 2015.
Reich has examined many policy issues related to access to medicines in developing countries. In 2002, he edited a book on public-private partnerships for public health (distributed by Harvard University Press), with a focus on access to medicines for neglected tropical diseases. In 2008, he published a book (coauthored with Laura Frost) entitled Access: How Do Good Health Technologies Get to Poor People in Poor Countries? (distributed by Harvard University Press). In 2011, he coauthored a book (with M.J. Roberts) called Pharmaceutical Reform: A Guide to Improving Performance and Equity (downloadable for free from the World Bank). He recently served as a member of the Lancet Commission on Essential Medicines Policies, which published its report in November 2016.
Since the early 1990s, Reich has worked with David Cooper to develop a Windows-based software program for applied political analysis. This tool, called PolicyMaker, provides a computer-assisted guide for strategic political thinking about policy reform. The software is available for free on the Internet. The method has been used to analyze health reform issues in many countries, in collaboration with national governments, international agencies, and civil society organizations
Many of his publications are available here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/michael-reich/publications/
(view full profile)
Margaret E. Kruk, M.D., M.P.H., is a Professor of Health Systems at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Kruk’s research generates evidence on how health systems can improve health for people living in low-income countries. Working with colleagues in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, and India, among other countries, she develops novel measures of health system quality and studies the links between quality and population demand for health care, health outcomes, and confidence in the system. Dr. Kruk and her team use implementation science and econometric methods to evaluate large-scale health system reforms.
Dr. Kruk is the Director of the QuEST Centers and Network: a multi-country collaboration to produce a global evidence base for improving health systems. The QuEST Network responds to the findings of the Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Health Systems in the SDG Era (HQSS Commission Links to an external site.), a global initiative chaired by Dr. Kruk. QuEST will develop new instruments to assess health system quality, test structural and policy solutions to systemic quality deficits, and support the expansion of high-impact health systems research in partner countries.
Prior to coming to Harvard, Dr. Kruk was an Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Better Health Systems Initiative at Columbia University. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan. She has held posts at the United Nations Development Program and McKinsey and Company and practiced medicine in northern Ontario, Canada. She holds an MD degree from McMaster University and an MPH from Harvard University. She is on Twitter @mkruk.
