People

Franco Sassi holds a Chair in International Health Policy and Economics and is the Director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation. He is also a Senior Health Economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – OECD, Paris (on leave) – where he developed and was responsible for the Organisation’s Public Health Programme. His work has been aimed at assessing the impacts of public policies to tackle major chronic diseases and their predisposing risk factors, including poor nutrition, physical inactivity, alcohol and tobacco use, and a range of environmental and social exposures

I have been a Professor of Technology and Innovation Management (Healthcare) at Imperial College Business School since 2003. I was co-founder of the Innovation Studies Centre, and from 2006-2013 I was Principal Investigator and a director of the Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre (HaCIRIC). I am a member of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation.

Benita Cox is the Programme Director for Imperial College Business School’s MSc International Health Management programme.

She holds a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence and an MSc in Management Science from Imperial College and has extensive experience teaching courses on Informatics at the Imperial College Business School.

Marisa joined the Imperial College Business School and the Health Care Management Group as an Assistant Professor in Economics in 2008.

In the past she has held academic appointments at the Centre for Health Economics and the Department of Economics and Related Studies both at the University of York.

Marisa holds a PhD in economics from York University, a MSc in Economics and Finance from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a Master of Arts in Economics from Université Catholique de Louvain and a first degree in economics from Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Laure de Preux is health and environmental economist. Her research uses micro-econometrics, and quantitative policy analysis methods. She also has extensive expertise in the use of hospital and climate data. Her work has been published in Health Economics, the Journal of Public Economics and the American Economic Review among others.Laure joined Imperial College London in 2013 as a Research Associate, she is funded by the British Academy to investigate the impact of climate variability on health outcomes in the UK. She has been appointed to Assistant Professor at the Business School and will start in September 2016. Previously, she was a research officer at the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. In parallel, she obtained a PhD in Economics from the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York.

Carol is a Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School in the Organisation & Management Group.

Carol’s research interests focus on the impact of incentives on the quality of health care delivery and health system productivity and, more widely, on the design and consequences of incentives within the public sector and the boundary between the state and private markets.

Pedro Rosa Dias works on health economics in developing countries, inequalities in health and healthcare and the effects of educational policy on health outcomes. Before joining Imperial College London he held academic positions at the Universities of Sussex and York. Pedro has a PhD in Economics from the University of York and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Peter C. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Health Policy. He is a mathematics graduate from the University of Oxford, and started his academic career in the public health department at the University of Cambridge. He has worked and published in a number of disciplinary settings, including statistics, operational research and accountancy. However, his main work has been in the economics of health and the broader public services, and he was a previous Director of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. At Imperial he launched and co-directed the Centre for Health Policy in the Institute of Global Health Innovation. Peter has acted in numerous UK governmental advisory capacities. He has also advised many overseas governments and international agencies, including the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

My research interests include the design, adoption, implementation and sustainability of innovation in healthcare systems. I am currently involved in research on the introduction of methods, approaches and technologies designed to improve the quality of health and healthcare services as well as in the development of a global health innovation index aimed at comparing indicators of healthcare innovation across countries.

I joined Imperial College Business School in February 2016 where I work in collaboration with the National Institute for Healthcare Research CLAHRC (Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) North West London.

My education includes a Master’s Degree in Science in Industrial and Management Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan, a Postgraduate Master’s Degree in Management of Healthcare Organizations from the Cattolica University in Rome and a European PhD in Enterprise Engineering from the Tor Vergata University of Rome, in collaboration with Imperial College London.

Before joining Imperial College I worked in pharmaceutical and consulting firms as well as in the administration of an Italian research hospital “Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza”.

Elisabetta is an applied microeconomist with a particular focus on food security, child and adolescent development, and social protection in low and middle income countries.

Her research is currently focusing on the impact of food security on child development in India; the food security, health and educational effects of an innovative school feeding programme in Ghana; the impact of conflict in Mali on child development and household food security; and adolescent girls’ nutrition and its effects on their children in four diverse countries.

Elisabetta obtained her PhD in Development Economics from the University of Roma Tre in Italy where she focused on food insecurity and childhood poverty in low- and middle-income countries. The suite of indicators she developed during her PhD has been adopted by FAO since 2014 to track global food security.

Elisabetta joined the Imperial College Business School as Guido Cazzavillan Research Fellow in 2017. Prior to that, she held academic appointments at the Partnership for Child Development, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. She is currently research associate with Young Lives, University of Oxford, and the Leverhulme Centre for Integrated Research in Health and Agriculture (LCIRAH), University of London. Elisabetta also conducted extensive research consultancy on food security and child nutrition for, among others, the University of Pennsylvania, FAO, UNDP and IFPRI.

She teaches modules on “Poverty: concepts and measures” and “Food Security” at the Bsc in Global Health and in the Master in Public Health at Imperial College London, and at the Master in “Human Development and Food Security” at University of Roma Tre.

Eliana Barrenho studies innovation, productivity and health needs. She has a number of papers examining R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the role of competition and alliances between firms; location and direction of R&D investment and competition; and policy determinants for the R&D investment and adoption of new products.

Dr. Reza Skandari completed his PhD in Management Science at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia in 2016. He then worked for the Center for Translational and Policy Research of Chronic Diseases at the University of Chicago as a Senior Research Analyst between Aug 2017 and Aug 2018. He then joined Imperial College Business School as an Assistant Professor in Health Operations, and is affiliated with the Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation.

Reza’s research generally focuses on a wide range of optimizing healthcare design decisions, ranging from treatment plans to health policies. Methodologically, he has used various analytics tools including optimization methods, stochastic and deterministic, simulation, statistics, and machine learning. Reza is a co-investigator on several publicly funded projects from the United States National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, and American Diabetes Association. Reza’s research has been published in top operations management journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Computers & Operations Research, as well as top medical journals including the Annals of Internal Medicine, Diabetes Care, and American Journal of Kidney Diseases.

Dian’s research interests include the assessment of national health systems and the design, implementation and evaluation of health interventions at the population, community, and health systems level. Prior to joining Imperial College, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and research associate at Harvard University working on the Malaysia Health Systems Research. With faculty and researchers at Harvard and Malaysia Ministry of Health, he conducted a comprehensive assessment of the country’s health system performance, health financing, and health services delivery. He also designed a large-scale mixed-method cluster randomized impact evaluation of the enhanced primary health care intervention towards tackling cardiovascular risk factors.

He has published papers on evaluating the impact of conditional cash transfers on maternal and health outcomes from my doctoral dissertation. He also has manuscripts on absolute and relative inequalities in cardiovascular disease risk factors, trends in and impact of multimorbidity on healthcare utilization and expenditure, and methodology of enhanced primary health care evaluation from the Malaysia work.

He obtained his Doctor of Science in global health and population with major in health systems and minor in economics from Harvard, Master of Public Health from Royal Tropical Institute (Amsterdam), and Bachelor of Science in Public Health from University of Indonesia.

Tim completed his PhD in Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington in New Zealand, during which he also spent one year at Harvard University on a Fulbright scholarship. Broadly, his research examines the role spatial and social factors—and the interaction between the two—play in the development of non-communicable diseases among youth. Tim also has degrees in Physical Education and Classical Studies.

Elisa holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from UCL, an MSc in Nutritional Science from the Food and Development Research Centre (CIAD) in Mexico, and a BSc in Chemical-Biology with a speciality in food technology from the University of Sonora in Mexico. Her research interests include spatial epidemiology, nutrition, public health and policy analysis.

In the past, she has worked with the assessment of the food environment and its association with obesity in Mexico using multilevel linear regression and the assessment of dietary patterns and breast cancer risk. She has also collaborated in the construction of the Global Database on the Implementation of Nutrition Action (GINA) from the WHO and obesity projections in Europe in collaboration with the UK Health Forum.

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Please visit the Professional Web Page

Lorraine joined Imperial in February 2013 as PA/Group Administrator to the Head of the Health Department, and currently supports the activities of CHEPI and Imperial Business Analytics. She has assisted several departments within Imperial College Business School and has over 30 years’ experience within administration and finance.  

Rose Tudball has worked at Imperial College Business School since 2008, previously as Coordinator for the Entrepreneurship Hub and currently as Programme Manager for MSc International Health Management. She holds a BSc in Management Sciences from the University of Warwick.

Jack Olney joined CHEPI as Centre Manager in April 2017 after completing his PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology. His research centred on modelling HIV care systems in sub-Saharan Africa to identify cost-effective strategies to achieve international targets. He also holds an MSc in Epidemiology from Imperial College London, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Southampton.