Gisela Robles Aguilar (PhD) has recently completed her DPhil degree in Social Policy, University of Oxford. Her research is focused in analyzing the extent to which participation in cash transfers is constrained by the conditionality attached to such anti-poverty programmes. She worked as a research assistant for the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative from 2008 to 2012.
Dr. “Subu” Subramanian (PhD) is a Professor of Population Health and Geography at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and a senior core faculty at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. He is also the founding director for an interdisciplinary PhD program in Population Health Sciences that is currently being developed at Harvard. He received his under- and post-graduate training at the University of Delhi, and completed his PhD in geography from the University of Portsmouth, UK in 2000. Subu has published over 425 articles, book chapters, and books in the field of social and contextual determinants of health, health inequalities in India with a special emphasis on nutritional inequalities among children and adults, and applied multilevel statistical models. He has co-edited 2 books titled Global Perspectives on Social Capital and Health and Social Capital and Health. Subu was the first to develop a course on the concept and application of multilevel statistical methods at Harvard, which he has been successfully teaching at Harvard Chan since 2001, as well as around the world. He has advised over 100 masters, doctoral and postdoctoral students as mentor, academic advisor and dissertation committee member. Subu has served as a permanent member of the National Institutes of Health Community Influences on Health Behavior (CIHB) Study Section, and as reviewer for several national and international funding agencies. He is the Editor-in-Chief (along with Ichiro Kawachi) for the international journal Social Science & Medicine (SSM), in addition to be being a Senior Editor for the social epidemiology office of SSM. He is an editorial consultant to The Lancet, an international advisory board member for the Lancet Global Health, and serves as an academic editor to PLoS Medicine, besides serving as an editorial board member of several journals.
Andy Sumner is a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development, King’s College London. He holds associate positions at the University of Oxford; at the UNU World Institute of Development Economics Research; at the Center for Global Development, Washington, DC and at Padjadjaran University, Indonesia.
He was Vice President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes from 2008 to 2014 and a Council Member of the Development Studies Association from 2000 to 2014.
His research is focused on poverty, its causes, and the relationship between poverty, inequality and economic development. In particular, it focuses on the question of why, in some instances, poverty persists despite economic development and in other cases it does not -- in short, how different modes of economic development and structural change have different welfare outcomes.
His work has focused on these issues with reference to global poverty and global inequality and with reference to economic development in Southeast Asia, notably Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
He is currently the Principal Investigator of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Global Challenges Strategic Research Network that is pursuing these issues in a wide set of countries.
Stéphane Verguet (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population. Dr. Verguet’s multidisciplinary research focuses on health decision science and priority setting, particularly the development of mathematical and computational decision-making models to better design health policies. His research interests include health economics, cost-effectiveness analysis, equity, and health systems performance. Most recently, he has been working on the estimation of non-health benefits, particularly the poverty alleviation benefits and financial risk protection aspects, of health policies and interventions.
He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, and holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and a Master in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Health and Metrics and Evaluation.
After obtaining a Bachelor’s-Master’s degree in Psychology and an MD, Daniel became a University Specialist in Psychiatry, focusing on the direct clinical care of the most severely affected patients. His experience cuts across sectors (NGOs, public hospitals, and for-profit organizations), serving in diverse positions such as clinician, program director, and board member. He developed the first Assertive Community Treatment Department in Argentina in collaboration with King’s College (UK) and Columbia University (US), where he was a Redeamericas Fellow. He has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on mental health issues such as psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, nosology, epidemiology, and service development, and is an Editorial Board Member of the Argentine Journal of Psychiatry. His doctoral work at Harvard has focused on mental health, specifically burden of disease estimation, service improvement, and health systems assessment. He is a Centennial Fellow at HSPH, a Canada Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, a Research Associate at HSPH’s Global Health Systems Cluster and at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addictions (BC, Canada), a consultant to PAHO, and an Advisor to the Lancet Commission on NCDs and Injuries for the poorest billion. The goal of his current work is to make mental health a global health and development priority.
David Watkins is a physician scientist in the Departments of Medicine at the University of Washington and University of Cape Town, and he is a senior researcher with the Disease Control Priorities Network based at the University of Washington. His research seeks to inform the health system response to non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries. His contributions to science include burden of disease analysis, mixed methods research to identify gaps in healthcare delivery, and economic evaluation of health policies. One of his specific areas of emphasis is the relationship between NCDs and poverty, and he has contributed to a number of projects and initiatives on rheumatic heart disease, which is a model NCD of poverty and the subject of today’s presentation. Originally from Tennessee, Dr. Watkins received a bachelor of science from Rhodes College and a doctor of medicine from Duke University before moving to Seattle, where he completed a residency in internal medicine, an MPH through the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and a research fellowship in health economics with the Disease Control Priorities Network.