28 Feb Health Economist Anna Vassall appointed as Joep Lange Chair Holder
Anna Vassall will develop novel methods to evaluate innovative technological and health financing approaches to improve access to health care
The Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program brings together experts from different backgrounds and geographies to collaborate on research that will help drive change in the field of global health. The Chair is established by the Joep Lange Institute and is hosted by the Department of Global Health of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) and the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD).
The newly appointed Joep Lange Chair Holder health economist Anna Vassall aims to further develop and apply methods to inform priority setting, assess cost-effectiveness and evaluate the poverty impact of interventions that are piloted and implemented by JLI, AIGHD and their partners.
Anna Vassall is currently a Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Global Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She leads the economic evaluation and priority setting group, and specializes on the economics of HIV, sexual and reproductive health, gender-based violence prevention and tuberculosis (TB). She has an interest in considering health system constraints and patient perspectives into research to inform priority setting and health sector financing. Anna has been appointed Joep Lange Chair starting from 1 February 2018.
The Joep Lange Chair and Fellows programs was established in 2015 in commemoration of Joep Lange and Jacqueline van Tongeren, with the aim to promote collaborative research and achieve groundbreaking progress in health systems and service delivery in low- and middle-income countries. The multidisciplinary approach is echoed in the unique rotating character of the Chair, which will welcome up to five (partly concurrent) professors from different fields of expertise in five years.
The Joep Lange Institute promotes innovations to make health markets work for the poor. The Institute believes innovations in (digital) technology and finance will help reach more people at lower cost, and offer new ways to address access and barriers to care.
For more information
For more information on the Chair, AIGHD and the Joep Lange Institute please contact Laurens Pels, communications manager for the Joep Lange Institute on +31 6 19 206 238 or l.pels@joeplangeinstitute.org
About Anna Vassall
Anna Vassall is a Professor of Health Economics with over twenty-five years of experience in economic analysis in low and middle-income countries. Her first degree is in economics. She worked in the National Health Service of the United Kingdom supporting funding/contracting. She then pursued an MSc in Health Planning and Financing at the LSHTM, thereafter working for DFID as a health economist in the UK and Pakistan. This was followed by a period at Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) Amsterdam working on health planning and financing, aid effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis and reproductive health in a wide range of low and middle-income countries. Thereafter she directed and provided economic support to European Community and World Bank funded health sector reform and development projects in Yemen, East Timor, Syria, Sudan and South Sudan. Her PhD is in economic evaluation from the University of Amsterdam.
She has led a wide range of economic analyses on HIV prevention for key populations (Avahan program), the integration and organization of HIV care and treatment services (Integra project), and new diagnostics for TB (Xpert MTB/RIF).
She is a founding member of the TB-MAC modelling consortium and sits on the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for the WHO’s Global TB Program (STAG-TB) and the Task Force on Catastrophic Cost Measurement for TB. She is a lead investigator of the Global Health Costing Consortium; a Bill and Melinda Gates funded project to estimate and analyze HIV, TB and other health service costs globally.