Karl Claxton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York. In 1997/98 he was a visiting Harkness Fellow at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, Harvard School of Public Health, and since 1999 he has held an adjunct appointment at Harvard as an Assistant Professor of Health and Decision Sciences. His research interests encompass the economic evaluation of health care technologies. Key areas of interests, which were the focus of his doctoral work include: Bayesian decision theory; the value-of-information analysis; setting priorities in clinical research and development; and the efficient design of clinical trials. In September 1999 Dr. Claxton was appointed to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee. The committee meets monthly to appraise new and existing heath care technologies and develop guidance for the NHS on the use of these technologies. Dr. Claxton received a Ph.D. in Economics, a M.Sc. in Health Economics, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of York.
Kenneth A. Freedberg, M.D., MSc, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Program in Epidemiology and Outcomes Research at the Harvard Medical School's Division of AIDS, and Director of the HIV Research Program in the Division of General Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2000, he joined the Divisions of General Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Massachusetts General Hospital to develop a program in HIV epidemiology and outcomes research. Dr. Freedberg's research interests include decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and clinical epidemiology, particularly related to HIV clinical care and policy. He is or has been principal investigator on projects sponsored by NIAID, NIMH, CDC, AHRQ, and HRSA. Much of his work centers around "The Cost-effectiveness of Preventing AIDS Complications (CEPAC) group, which he directs, in collaboration with investigators at Harvard School of Public Health, Boston University, Yale University, Weill Cornell Medical College, and University of Tourcoing in Lille, France. This effort has now expanded to include investigators in South Africa,
Côte
d'Ivoire, India, Mexico, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). Dr. Freedberg is former Chair of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) Outcomes Committee and has developed efforts to incorporate clinical economic analysis into AIDS clinical trials on a national level. In 1984, he earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, followed in 1989, by an MSc in Health Services Administration from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Myriam Hunink
M.G. Myriam Hunink, M.D., Ph.D. received her M.D. degree from the University of Leiden, trained as a radiologist in Amsterdam, and received her Ph.D. degree in clinical decision analysis from the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Subsequently, she did subspecialty training in cardiovascular radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston and a research fellowship in decision sciences at Harvard School of Public Health. After some time as Assistant Professor in Decision Sciences at Harvard School of Public Health, she was awarded a prestigious grant in the Netherlands that enticed her to return and accept a position as Associate Professor at the University of Groningen.
Currently she holds appointments as Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and
Professor of Radiology at the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, the Netherlands and as Adjunct Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. Dr. Hunink's research focuses on the assessment of diagnostic imaging and image-guided therapeutic technologies, using techniques from clinical epidemiology, meta analysis, decision modeling, and cost-effectiveness analysis. Her main interest is in the evaluation of technologies for the management of cardiovascular disease. Methodological issues of special interest to her are the evaluation of diagnostic imaging and stochastic modeling.
Karen Kuntz
Karen Kuntz, Sc.D., is a Professor at the Minnesota School of Public Health and a health decision scientist with experience in the methods and applications of using simulation modeling to evaluate clinical and public health strategies. She is the principal investigator of one of the Canter Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) grants funded by the National Cancer Institute to evaluate the national trends in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality. She is also principal investigator of a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to examine the effects of disparities in screening, follow-up and treatment on cancer-related outcomes. In addition to specific applications, she has become one of the leading authorities on describing errors and biases that can occur in disease modeling.
Dr. Lieu is a Professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention and is a general pediatrician and health services researcher. She is Director of DACP's Center for Child Health Care Studies, a multidisciplinary group whose goal is to improve children's health through research that enhances decisions by policymakers, clinicians, and parents. Dr. Lieu's research focuses on primary care delivery, family-centered outcomes, and cost-effectiveness. Her current studies include CDC- and NIH-supported projects in vaccine safety, delivery, and economics, as well as in childhood asthma disparities. Before coming to DACP, Dr. Lieu conducted research at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. She has served on national policymaking committees including the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Dr. Lieu directs the Children's Hospital site of the Harvard Pediatric Health Services Research fellowship, teaches in the medical and public health schools, and practices as a part-time pediatrician with Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates.
Pamela McMahon, Ph.D., is the Associate Director at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment and an Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She received a B.S. with distinction in Biology (Neurobiology and Behavior), from Cornell University in 1990 and completed her Ph.D. in Health Policy at Harvard University in 2005. She was the recipient of training grants from the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute. Dr. McMahon previously worked in biomedical research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Genetics Institute (now Wyeth), where she was a scientist in the Discovery Research department. In 1998, she joined the ITA, where her work has focused on informing decisions about the appropriate use of imaging strategies for diagnosing cancer and other diseases. She is currently developing a policy model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of helical CT screening for lung cancer. Her methodological research interests include Bayesian evidence synthesis and estimation of competing mortality risks, as well as calibration techniques for complex microsimulation models. She has also co-authored articles on the cost-effectiveness of diagnostic strategies for Alzheimer's disease, pancreatic cancer, and colorectal cancer, and cost analyses of stroke and abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.
Peter Neumann
Peter J. Neumann, Sc.D., is Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts-New England Medical Center. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, where he was previously Associate Professor of Policy and Decision Sciences. His research focuses on the role of cost-effectiveness analysis in health care decision-making. He has conducted numerous economic evaluations of medical technologies, including evaluations of treatments for Alzheimer's Disease. He also directs a project to develop a comprehensive registry of cost-effectiveness analyses in health care. Dr. Neumann has contributed to the literature on the use of willingness- to-pay and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) in valuing health benefits. His other research has focused on the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of health economic information, and the role of clinical and economic evidence in informing public and private sector health care decisions, including those made by the Medicare program. He has published widely in the medical literature and is the author of
Using Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to Improve Health Care
Health Affairs
(Oxford University Press, 2005). He is a contributing editor of
and a member of the editorial board of
Value in Health. Dr. Neumann is currently serving as President of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and is a trustee of the Society for Medical Decision Making. He has also held various policy positions in Washington, including Special Assistant to the Administrator at the Health Care Financing Administration. He received his Sc.D. in health policy and management from Harvard University.
Joseph
Pliskin is the Sidney Liswood Professor of Health Care Management at Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev in Israel.
He is a member of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management and
the Department of Health Systems Management. Dr. Pliskin also has an
appointment as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Policy and
Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. His research interests focus
on clinical decision making, operations management in health care
organizations, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis in health and
medicine, technology assessment, utility theory, and decision analysis. He has
published extensively on issues relating to end stage renal disease, heart
disease, Down syndrome, technology assessment, and methodological issues in
decision analysis. He is co-author of the book
Decision Making in Health and
Medicine: Integrating Evidence and Values
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,
2001) and co-author of
Focused Operations Management for Health Services Organizations
(Jossey-Bass, San-Francisco, 2006).
Lisa ProsserLisa Prosser, Ph.D.,. is an Associate Professor with the Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) unit within the Division of General Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School, and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention (DACP) at the Harvard Medical School. Her major research interests include economic evaluations of childhood health interventions and methods for valuing changes in health, and her research on the economic impact of influenza vaccination has been used in setting national vaccine policy for children and for prioritizing subgroups in vaccine shortage years. Her current research focuses on policy-relevant topics concerning the cost-effectiveness of childhood interventions and improving economic methods for valuing child health. Cost-effectiveness projects in progress include evaluations of an expanded newborn screening program, influenza vaccination in settings outside the physician office, and a behavioral intervention for parents of overweight and obese preschoolers ("High Five for Kids"). Preference measurement projects include the valuation of temporary health states, such as those associated with false-positive test results, using online survey methods, including discrete choice experiments. Current research topics in this area include a cost-effectiveness analysis of the High Five intervention and research on economic barriers to obesity prevention and management. Dr. Prosser received her Ph.D. in health policy from HarvardUniversity. She also holds a M.S. degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a M.S. from the Technology and Policy Program at MIT. Her undergraduate degree is in mathematics from CornellUniversity.
Rinaa Punglia, M.D., MPH, is a radiation oncologist at the Women's Cancers Program at Dana-Farber who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer. Currently, she uses mathematical models to forecast trends in clinical trials while they are in progress. Like a pre-election opinion poll, her work makes it possible to glimpse outcomes in advance, giving doctors information that may be useful in treating patients immediately. She received an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2002 after completing her M.D. in 1998 at the Harvard Medical School.Bruce Schackman
Bruce Schackman, Ph.D.
is an Associate Professor of Public Health at the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York), and Chief of the Division of Health Policy. His research interests include cost-effectiveness analysis, quality of life measurement, and access to care by underserved populations. He is the recipient of a five-year mentored career development award from the NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse to assess the cost-effectiveness of treatment for chronic hepatitis C (HCV) in methadone maintenance treatment and other substance abuse treatment settings; in patients coinfected with HIV and HCV; and in HCV-infected pregnant women. He is also conducting health outcomes and cost-effectiveness assessments of HIV care demonstration projects in the United States, and of screening and care for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in Haiti. He received a B.A.
magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1980 and an M.B.A with honors from Harvard Business School in 1984 as well as a Ph.D. in Health Policy with a concentration in Decision Sciences from Harvard University in 2001.
Prof. Uwe Siebert, M.D., MPH, MSc, ScD, Professor of Public Health, is the Head of the Department of Public Health, Medical Decision Making and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) at the University of Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT) in Austria. He is also Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. His research interests include applying decision-analytic modeling, meta-analysis, quality-of-life assessment, and cost-effectiveness analysis in the framework of health technology assessments (HTA) as well as in the clinical context of routine health care. His current substantive research focuses on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer screening, hepatitis C, HIV, and neurological disorders. His methodological research is focused on evaluations of public health interventions, prevention and screening, and diagnostic imaging procedures, as well as on the development of causal decision models based on complex longitudinal data with time-varying interventions or exposures. He teaches courses in decision analysis, HTA, and advanced epidemiologic methods at several universities and for industry in Europe and the US. He has authored more than 100 publications including HTA reports, textbook chapters for decision analysis, and scientific articles and editorials.
Dr.
Natasha Stout is an Instructor in Ambulatory Care and Prevention at the Harvard Medical School focusing on developing and using
population-based discrete-event simulation models to inform
decision-making at both the individual and societal level. She has
particular expertise in the area of cancer natural history modeling to
evaluate prevention and control strategies. As a graduate student, Dr.
Stout helped develop a simulation model of the epidemiology of breast
cancer and has utilized this model to evaluate the performance of
screening mammography in the U.S. Her current research agenda includes
evaluation of risks and benefits in breast and cervical cancer
screening, as well as a methodological approach to developing novel
model calibration techniques. She is the recent recipient of an
NIH-sponsored F-32 training grant to model the implications of breast
cancer prevention and control. Dr. Stout received a B.A. in Mathematics
from Oberlin College, and an M.S. in Operations Research and Ph.D. in
Population Health Sciences from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to
her Ph.D., she worked at Epic Systems, a leading firm in the field of
healthcare information software.
Rochelle Walensky, M.D., MPH is Associate Director of the Program in Epidemiology and Outcomes Research at the Harvard Center for AIDS Research. Her research interests include the promotion of routine HIV counseling, testing and referral and the economic evaluation of alternative HIV testing and treatment policies. Dr. Walensky has published work on evaluating alternative treatment strategies for patients with primary HIV infection, on the clinical and cost-effectiveness of HIV vaccines of varying efficacies, and on the value of primary genotypic resistance testing. Her research is conducted both in the US and abroad. Current projects include: 1) the evaluation of the impact of treatment on AIDS survival in the US; 2) the development of an HIV testing program in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa; 3) a cost-effectiveness analysis on routine HIV testing in South Africa; and 4) a clinical and cost-effectiveness analysis of the use of sentinel resistance testing in Cote d'Ivoire. Dr. Walensky earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995, and an MPH in 2001 from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Claire Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health whose research focuses on using mathematical models integrating epidemiology and demography to inform policy-making concerning population health. Her areas of interest center on the distribution of modifiable risk factors and their joint implications for disease burden in the population or population segments. In the past five years, she has been involved in developing a simulation model of colorectal cancer by using large national surveys to establish trends of risk factors and screening dissemination in the U.S. Her present projects focus on the obesity epidemic in adults and in children. She is working with the National Cancer Institute to construct life tables by body mass index and smoking to document their secular trends and impacts on mortality in the US population. She is also supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to model the role of diet and physical activity in contributing to excess energy storage and childhood obesity. In collaboration with researchers of a variety of fields, she has also applied simulation methods to provide quantitative insights into issues such as antibiotic resistance, disclosure policy of medical injuries, and medication adherence. Dr. Wang obtained her M.D. from the National Taiwan University, College of Medicine in 2000, and both her M.S. in Epidemiology (2001) and Sc.D. in Health Policy and Management (2005) from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Weeks joined the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in 1992 and established its Center for Outcomes and Policy Research in 1995. Her research interests include the assessment of outcomes and cost-effectiveness of cancer prevention and treatment strategies as well as the incorporation of prospective cost-effectiveness analysis into large-scale clinical trials. Some of her studies focus on assessing both efficacy of treatment and quality of life during the various stages of cancer. Dr. Weeks received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1984 and her MSc in health policy and management from Harvard School of Public Health in 1991. She completed postgraduate training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and in medical oncology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Eve Wittenberg, M.P.P., Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the methodological issues involved in measuring quality of life and outcomes, emphasizing preference assessment and utility elicitation, and the application of these measures in economic evaluation of medical interventions and health care programs. Her work also explores decision making at the individual and policy levels. Current projects address methods of valuing health states, focusing on issues of adaptation and forecasting in utility assessment, methods to measure quality of life in public health contexts, and the influence of risk perception in medical decision making. She is particularly interested in the health of women, including breast cancer and intimate partner violence, and in issues of equity in health.
Her masters degree is in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government and her doctorate is in health policy from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Center for Outcomes and Policy Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.