COOPERATION - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Indian Team
- Research Associate at IFMR
Alreena works with the Centre for Microfinance at IFMR LEAD as Research Associate on a Mental Health and Productivity Evaluation based in Bangalore. At CMF, she has also been involved in various other RCTs and short-term evaluations for AKRSP (I) and The Banyan. She has field experience in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Chennai, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Alreena holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai after which she worked as Research Assistant at the Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics on the EU-funded "NO POOR Project" studying the dynamics and dimensions of Indian urban poverty. She has previously interned with ToolBox India Foundation and Save The Children - India.
Mr. Carlos Antonio R. Tan, Jr. is currently a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Advisor and OIC-Deputy Chief of Party in the Health Policy Development Program Phase 2 (HPDP2), a USAID-funded project implemented by UPecon Foundation, Inc. He is also Group Manager for the Support to Implementation Research and Monitoring and Evaluation (SIRME) of UPecon Foundation, Inc., under HPDP2. The SIRME group assists the Department of Health (DOH) in strengthening policy and national monitoring program for family planning and maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition (FP/MNCHN) and tuberculosis (TB).
Job Titles:
- Leader
- Member of the Indian Team
- Principal Investigator
- Economist at the Center for Economic
Daniel Bennett is an economist at the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. He studies economic development and global health in Africa and South Asia. Much of Dr. Bennett's work examines the way that information affects individual health care decisions and the operation of health care markets. He also focuses on the influence of mental health on productivity and economic decision-making. Dr. Bennett's work involves primary data collection and uses both experimental and quasi-experimental methods. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 from Brown University and spent eight years on the faculty at the University of Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Professor of Economics
Dr. Aleli D. Kraft is Professor of Economics and currently the Health Economics Program Coordinator at the University of the Philippines School of Economics. Her professional experience include positions at the National Economic and Development Authority, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and consulting work for health and international trade projects funded by the World Bank, USAID, and the ADB. She was the Principal Investigator for the Philippine Tuberculosis Initiatives for the Private Sector Project (PhilTIPS) which collected and analyzed primary data on private physician knowledge, attitude and practice of Tuberculosis Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course (TB-DOTS).
Job Titles:
- Professor of Economics and Director for Research at the University
Dr. Joseph J. Capuno is Professor of Economics and Director for Research at the University of the Philippines School of Economics. He led the UPecon-HEFPA Study Team, a collaborative project involving 12 research teams in Europe and in Asia. The UPecon-HEFPA Project featured a randomized control trial of health insurance interventions, analyses on household exposure to and coping with shocks and on local government provision of health insurance coverage to the indigent population. Besides research in health economics and health policy, he has also done work on decentralization and governance.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Sri Lankan Team
- Co - Applicant
- Executive Director & Fellow of the Institute of Health Policy
Dr. Ravindra P. Rannan-Eliya is Executive Director & Fellow of the Institute of Health Policy (IHP). He has expertise in a number of areas relating to health systems equity, health financing and policy, social protection and public expenditure analysis, with research, consulting and field experience in UK, Serbia, Turkey, Kyrgyz Republic, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mongolia, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia.
He is a leading international expert in health expenditure estimation and projection methods and health accounts systems, collaborating extensively with WHO, World Bank, OECD and Eurostat and has been lead analyst of several assessments of pension and social security schemes in Sri Lanka, and currently leading team designing new pension scheme for informal workers. He has extensive experience in design and analysis of large household and health care provider surveys, in a diverse range of settings (Africa, Asia, Latin America). His doctoral work from Harvard University USA focused on research on developing comparable indicators of trends in productivity of public sector health delivery systems.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Department of Population Policies
- Co - Principal Investigator
Dr Sarang is Assistant Professor at the department of Population Policies and Programmes, International Institute for Population Sciences. He has completed MBBS from Government Medical College, Aurangabad and MD in Community Medicine from TNMC and BYL Nair Ch. Hospital, Mumbai. He His professional experience includes more than 5 years of teaching and research in public health, epidemiology and demography. He is co- principal investigator of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) and member of PI team for National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 5, 2018-2019, and has completed National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 4, 2015-2016. Dr. Sarang will work as part of PI team and will contribute to the health component including vision test and intervention of the study.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Sri Lankan Team
- Researcher
- Institute for Health Policy As a Senior Fellow
Dr. Sarath Samarage joined the Institute for Health Policy as a Senior Fellow in April 2016, after serving as a National Consultant at the World Health Organization Country Office, Sri Lanka for six years. He is a Consultant Community Physician, and held the posts of Director Organization Development and Deputy Director General of Health Services (Planning) in the Ministry of Health prior to his retirement in 2010 after serving 32 years in different parts of the country.
Dr. Samarage holds a MPH (International Health) degree from the John Hopkins University, USA and a Masters and Doctoral Degrees in Community Medicine from the Post-Graduate Institute of Medicine in Sri Lanka. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Graduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo and has served in the Boards of Study in Community Medicine and Medical Administration. He has been conferred with the fellowships of the College of Community Physicians and the College of Medical Administrators of Sri Lanka for his outstanding contributions to the fields of Community Medicine and Medical Administration.
Dr Samarage is a Past President of the College of Medical Administrators of Sri Lanka. He also serves as the country focal point for the Asia-Pacific Action Alliance on Human Resources for Health (AAAH) and the Chairperson of the Sri Lanka Chapter of the Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA). He is the Commander of the St.John Ambulance Association & Brigade of Sri Lanka. He is a Council Member of the Independent Medical Practitioners Association. Dr Samarage's research interests are in the areas of Health Systems Development, Primary Health Care, Human Resources Development, and Health Policy & Planning.
Job Titles:
- Project Coordinator
- Researcher and Coordinator of the Project
Fabrice is currently a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The focus of his PhD thesis is on aging and its various implications on health, social behaviors and technology adoption. Recently he has been interested in reporting heterogeneity and techniques to address it in empirical applications. He is the coordinator of the project since January 2016.
Gabriela Flores is an expert in the field of analytical assessment of financial protection and financial risk protection, econometric analysis of related data, and health financing strategies linked to moving closer to universal health coverage. She joined the World Health Organization (HGF) in January 2015 to take the main responsibility of the monitoring of financial protection at global levels and supports monitoring efforts in the WHO regions of the Americas, Europe and South-East Asia. She holds a PhD in Statistics and Econometrics from the University of Geneva. She has published in Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics and the Lancet Global Health among others.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Assistant
- Administrative Assistant at the University of Lausanne
Gaëlle is an administrative assistant at the University of Lausanne and has been taking care of the administrative side of the r4d project since its beginning.
Hans-Peter Kohler, Ph.D., is a social and economic demographer whose current research focuses on health, demography and social change in developing and developed countries. A key characteristic of his research is the attempt to integrate demographic, economic, sociological and biological approaches in empirical and theoretical models of health and demographic behaviors. In his prior work, he investigated the role of social and sexual networks for HIV risk perceptions and HIV infection risks, the causal effects of education on health, the consequences of learning one's HIV status on risky behaviors, the interrelations between marriage and sexual relations in developing countries, the role of social interaction processes for fertility and AIDS-related behaviors, and the determinants and consequences of low fertility in developed countries. His research combines extensive knowledge about the determinants of health, fertility/mortality, HIV/AIDS, and related economic behaviors in developing and developed countries with considerable experience in sophisticated econometric and demographic analyses, including analyses with controls for endowment and unobserved determinants of individuals' behaviors, models of population and disease dynamics, randomized designs and integration of social science and biomedical research methods. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of large-scale data collection in sub-Saharan contexts.
He has been awarded the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement by the Population Association of America for my interdisciplinary work on fertility and health, and have been honored with Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography by the American Sociological Association. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science, served as the president of the Society of Biodemography and Social Biology, and was engaged as lead-paper author in the Copenhagen Consensus Project to evaluate policies to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV (2011, with Behrman) and reduce population growth (2012). Kohler served as the Chair of Penn's Ph.D. Program in Demography for many years, and continues to be the NICHD T32 Training Director for this program (successfully renewed in 2012). He has also been the PI of the NIH grant "Consequences of High Morbidity and Mortality in a Low-Income Country" (R01HD053781) that supported the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH).
Iliana Kohler, Ph.D., is a population scientist and social demographer, with a background in both social and biomedical sciences. Her research focuses on global health issues and their social, economic and policy implications in different international contexts. Her primary research agenda is centered on health, health-related behaviors, mortality, aging and intergenerational transfers in an international context. Her most recent research focuses on aging in African poor high HIV-prevalence contexts, with a specific focus on the social and biological determinants and patterns of mental health and cognitive abilities. In her work, demography provides the overarching framework to understand the life-course determinants of aging, related intergenerational relations and transfers, the interactions between population dynamics and disease dynamics that are central to understanding current European and global demographic and health patterns.
Jürgen Maurer holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and currently works as Professor of Health Economics and Management at the Department of Economics and the Institute for Health Economics and Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC) of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is also an Adjunct Economist at the RAND Corporation, a senior research fellow at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, and a fellow at the Health, Econometrics, and Data Group of the University of York and the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. His research interests are in the areas of applied microeconomics, health economics, public health and survey research with a special focus on economic and social research on aging. Jürgen also serves as the principal investigator and country team leader of the Swiss component study of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and main applicant of a large-scale research for development (r4d) project on "Inclusive social protection for chronic health problems" supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. His papers have been published in economics, health economics, medical, public health and demography journals such as the Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA: Internal Medicine, the Lancet, the American Journal of Public Health, the American Journal of Epidemiology and Demography among others.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Indian Team
- Principal Investigator
- Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan
Manuela Angelucci is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She completed her PhD at University College London in 2005. Her main field is development economics.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Indian Team
- Project Manager at IFMR
Monisha has been with IFMR LEAD for over 4 years where she worked and managed several large scale RCTs and short term studies on Financial Inclusion, Healthcare, Agriculture and Livelihoods. Before joining IFMR, she worked at an Advertising and Consulting Agency in Bangalore as a Project Lead. She managed projects in Education and Healthcare and developed a Sustainability Report for a major corporate. She has a Master's Degree in Population and Development from the London School of Economics.
Ms. Figueroa Yap has more than 30 years experience in social sciences research and policy development, particularly in health, income and poverty, and gender issues. She has managed, supervised, and participated in a number of projects that combine research with implementation, monitoring and evaluation. These projects include UNDP-funded (together with the ADB and NEDA) poverty studies, EU-funded, and Swiss National Science Foundation-funded health policy research, health financing studies in collaboration with the GTZ and Erasmus University, USAID-funded health policy projects and capacity building projects, WB-funded rate rebasing assessment (water utilities), ADB-funded consumer impact study of the new law on electricity and power energy generation and use. These projects provided extensive experience in working with various foreign funding institutions, in implementing different approaches to project management, and in preparing progress and financial reports. Likewise, these projects provided opportunities for assessing effectiveness and efficiency in achieving outputs and outcomes relevant to the recipient institutions and individuals. Her teaching and training experience afforded proficiency in assessing and building skills and imparting knowledge, also realized in the publication of research outputs. She has a Master's degree in Economics and a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Sociology. She is fluent and articulate in writing and speaking English, Pilipino, and Ilocano.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Sri Lankan Team
- Researcher
- Research Associate at the Institute for Health Policy
Nilmini is a Research Associate at the Institute for Health Policy (IHP). Nilmini holds a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (Hons) and Bachelor of Medical Science from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Public Health from the University of Sydney. She previously worked as a doctor in Melbourne and Brisbane and as a Research Assistant at the Epidemiology Unit of the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka during 2006-2007. She has experience in analyzing non-communicable disease policy, healthcare utilization, disease-specific health accounts and quality of healthcare, particularly in low and middle-income countries.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Owen O'Donnell is Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Macedonia (on leave), a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, and a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute, Netspar and the CESR/Schaefer Center for the Study of Health Inequality. He has co-directed two European Union funded projects on equity in the finance and provision of health care in Asia (EQUITAP, HEFPA), is a co-author of Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data and has been a consultant to the World Bank, WHO and UNICEF. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics and Health Economics, and is co-organiser of the European Workshops on Econometrics and Health Economics. He obtained his doctorate from the University of York and has held visiting positions at the University of Lausanne and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a faculty appointment at the University of Kent.
Job Titles:
- Indian Principal Investigator
- Professor and Head
P. Arokiasamy is Professor and Head of the department of development studies, InternationalInstitute for Population Sciences, and the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) for the Indian collaborating institution, IIPS. His professional experience includes 27 years of teaching and research in demography, public health and development studies. He has coordinated or conducted major national research projects namely WHO sponsored World Health Survey (WHS) India, 2003-2005, National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 3, 2005-2007 and, two waves of the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE), wave-1 2006-2007 and wave-2 2015-16 (funded by WHO, Geneva).
He will lead the project team and will be overall responsible for technical and management aspects and implementation and completion of the project as per timeline. He will contribute to the development of the study design, scope, instrument, field implementation, analysis and preparation of reports.
Job Titles:
- Co - Principal Investigator
Sanjay K Mohanty is a trained economist and demographer and Professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. Prof Mohanty has more than two decades of teaching and research experienceand guided several doctoral students in their maiden research work.Prof Mohanty teaches "Health Economics" and "Fertility Measures" at IIPS. His research interests include economics of health and health care, economics of ageing, multidimensional poverty and population dynamics. Prof Mohanty has authored more than 80 research papers in international and national peer reviewed journals. Currently, he is associated with the "Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI)". Prof Mohanty was Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health during 2014-15 and C R Parekh Fellow at Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics between January in 2010. He was awarded the K.B. Pathakaward, 2009 by the Indian Association for Study of Population (IASP) and the P.N. Mari Bhat Award bythe Xavier Institute for Management (XIMB), Bhubaneswar)for his research work
Sanjay K Mohanty is a trained economist and demographer and Professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. Prof Mohanty has more than two decades of teaching and research experienceand guided several doctoral students in their maiden research work.Prof Mohanty teaches "Health Economics" and "Fertility Measures" at IIPS. His research interests include economics of health and health care, economics of ageing, multidimensional poverty and population dynamics. Prof Mohanty has authored more than 80 research papers in international and national peer reviewed journals. Currently, he is associated with the "Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI)". Prof Mohanty was Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health during 2014-15 and C R Parekh Fellow at Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics between January in 2010. He was awarded the K.B. Pathakaward, 2009 by the Indian Association for Study of Population (IASP) and the P.N. Mari Bhat Award bythe Xavier Institute for Management (XIMB), Bhubaneswar)for his research work
Job Titles:
- Member of the Sri Lankan Team
- Researcher
Dr. Dalpatadu joined the Institute for Health Policy (IHP) in June 2005, after 33 years of service in the government health sector and two years with WHO. He is a retired senior medical administrator, who has worked in various capacities in the Curative, Preventive and Administrative sectors in the Health Ministry and was the Deputy General of Health Services (Planning) for 8 years up to the time of his retirement. He served in the Medical Administrative grade for 16 years.
He is a Board Certified Consultant in Community Medicine and has obtained the MD in Community Medicine in 1981 from the Post Graduate Institute of Medicine in Sri Lanka. He is also a Fellow of the College of Medical Administrators of Sri Lanka. He has specialized skills in Health Care Management & Community Health. He also has training in areas of Hospital & Health Administration (UK), Health Planning & Management (USA), Health Care Evaluation (Canada), Human Resource Development (Australia), and Health Sector Reforms (USA) Burden of Disease & Health Systems Performance (South Africa).
He has been a Short Term Consultant, Short Term Professional, as well as a Temporary Advisor for WHO South East Asia Office, in the areas of Human Resource Development, Public Health Administration and Evidence for Health Policy & Health Care Financing. He has also been a national consultant in Sri Lanka for several projects.
He has conducted research studies in Sri Lanka, and was a member of the WHO /South East Asia Advisory Committee on Health Research (ACHR). He is a supervisor for research thesis for MD Community Medicine trainees and an examiner for MSc, MD courses in Medical Administration & Community Medicine. He is also a member of the Board of Studies for Medical Administrators & Community Medicine.
During his tenure as DDG (Planning) in the Ministry of Health (MOH), he was the chairman of the health expenditure survey committee which was responsible for supervising and monitoring the development of Sri Lanka National health accounts. He has played a lead role in many of the planning and evaluation of health activities of the MOH. He has functioned as Secretary to a number of high-level policy formulation implementation councils and committees of the MOH, such as the National Health Council, the National Health Development Committee, Health Development Committee and the Ministry of Health Advisory Committee.He has considerable experience in formulation of National Health Policies & Plans as he has been closely involved in these activities for the Ministry of Health from 1992 to 2002.