Members of the Scientific Advisory Board for Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development

Professor Martin McKee

Professor of European Public Health at the LSHTM, former President of the European Public Health Association, Research Director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies

Professor Martin McKee is Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) (United Kingdom) and Research Director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. He qualified in medicine in Northern Ireland and subsequently trained in public health in London. His research focuses on the health impact of major social, economic and political change in countries across the world. Professor McKee has been elected to the United Kingdom’s Academy of Medical Sciences, Academia Europaea and the United States’ National Academy of Medicine, has been awarded honorary doctorates from universities in Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to health care in Europe.

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Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat

Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat is Director of the Division of Country Health Policies and Systems at the WHO Regional Office for Europe and Associate Professor at the University of Malta. She is former President of the European Public Health Association. Dr Azzopardi-Muscat qualified as a medical doctor and proceeded to specialize in public health and health service management. Her transdisciplinary research bridging health policy, European studies and small states studies led to her doctoral thesis entitled “The Europeanisation of health systems: a small state perspective”. She has authored several publications in public health and European health policy. Between 2001 and 2013, she occupied various senior positions in the Ministry of Health in Malta, including that of Chief Medical Officer. Since 1999, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat has also been a resident academic at the University of Malta in the departments of health services management and public health.

Dr Josep Figueras

Dr Josep Figueras is cofounder and Director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. He has served major multilateral agencies in addition to WHO, including the European Commission and the World Bank, and has worked as a policy adviser in more than 40 countries within Europe and beyond. He is a member of several governing, advisory and editorial boards, including the governance board of the European Health Forum Gastein, and is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (United Kingdom). He was granted the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from Semmelweis University (Hungary), received the Andrija Štampar Medal for excellence in public health from the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, and has 3 times been awarded the European Health Management Association’s prize for best annual publication. He is currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom), and an external examiner at universities in London; Maastricht, the Netherlands; and Cork, Ireland. He was Director of the MSc in Health Services Management and a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He started his career as a specialist in family and community medicine in Spain.

Professor Elias Mossialos

Professor Elias Mossialos is Brian Abel-Smith Professor of Health Policy and Head of the Department of Health Policy at LSE. He is also Director of LSE Health, currently LSE’s largest research centre, which he founded in 1996 to foster the training of young researchers and fund several doctoral and post-doctoral students. He has advised the European Commission, the European Parliament, the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading, WHO, the World Bank, ministries of health and social affairs, and health insurance funds in various countries across continents. He was a member of the management board of the European Medicines Agency (2000–2003) and the board of the Hellenic National Medicines Agency (2000–2002). He contributed to the International Forum “Common access to health care services” coordinated by the health ministers of New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Professor Mossialos also served as Minister of State in Greece in 2011. From 2009 to 2012, as a Member of Parliament of Greece, he served as a member of 4 parliamentary select committees (social affairs, educational affairs, defence and foreign affairs, and European affairs). From 2010 to 2011, he chaired the Parliament’s Special Permanent Committee on Monitoring the Social Security System.

Professor Aleksandra Torbica

Professor Aleksandra Torbica is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Centre for Research for Health and Social Care Management (CERGAS) at Bocconi University (Italy).  She holds a Master of Health Economics, Management and Policy degree from Bocconi University and a doctorate in economics and management of public organizations from the University of Parma (Italy). She is a member of the Executive Board of the Italian Health Economics Association, and former Secretary General. Her research interests lie at the intersection of health policy, health economics and health-care management. She is interested in exploring different methodologies stemming from these disciplines to investigate decision-making processes at macro (policy) and micro (management) levels, both in high- and lower-middle-income countries. Professor Torbica has obtained numerous research grants and coordinated important international research projects funded by the European Commission. She has also co-authored numerous publications in prestigious outlets in the fields of health economics, health services research and health policy. Since 2016, she has served as Co-Editor of Value in Health journal.

Dr Clemens Martin Auer

Dr Clemens Martin Auer is Special Envoy for Health in the Federal Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health and Consumer Protection of Austria. He started his political career in the early 1990s by leading the political department of the Austrian conservative party. Having joined the Ministry of Health in 2004 as Cabinet Chief, he later switched to the civil service. Dr Auer’s academic background is in philosophy and political science. In September 2018, he was nominated by the WHO Regional Committee for Europe to be a member of the WHO Executive Board in Geneva, Switzerland, from 2019 to 2022. Since 2017, he has been President of the European Health Forum Gastein, an interdisciplinary European health conference in which the Austrian Ministry of Health, the European Commission and WHO participate. For meritorious services, Dr Auer was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver with Star from the Republic of Austria (2014) and the Golden Ring of Honour of the Austrian Social Insurance Institutions (2018)

Dr Reinhard Busse

Dr Reinhard Busse is a German physician and health economist. He is a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, where he has served as Head of the Department of Health Care Management in the Faculty of Economics and Management since 2002. The Department has been designated as the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Systems Research and Management. He is the current Scientific Director and a founding member of the Berlin Centre of Health Economics Research (BerlinHECOR), and a faculty member of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He is also Co-Director and Head of the Berlin hub of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, and Director of the Observatory’s annual summer school in Venice. He is a member of several scientific advisory boards and a regular consultant for national health and research institutions in Germany as well as international organizations such as the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, WHO and the World Bank. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Health Policy since 2011. Since 2013, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has ranked him among Germany’s most influential economists.

Professor Kairat Davletov

Dr Kairat Davletov graduated from Kazakh National Medical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 1986, and worked as a cardiologist at the Republican Research Institute of Cardiology and Internal Diseases until 1990. He then moved to the National Medical Research Center of Cardiology in Moscow, Russian Federation, where he completed his doctoral thesis on cardiology in 1994. After returning to Almaty, he worked for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Health, and later for the National Centre of Healthy Lifestyle. In 2004, he graduated from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University (United States of America) with a Master of Public Health degree. After graduation, Dr Davletov worked for the American International Health Alliance and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Central Asia Regional Health Office in Almaty. In 2013, he rejoined the Republican Research Institute of Cardiology and Internal Diseases in Almaty as Deputy Director. In 2016, he moved to Kazakh National Medical University as Dean of the School of Public Health, but later decided to devote more time to research. Since 2019, he has been Director of the Health Research Institute at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. He is a member of the European Public Health Association, the European Society of Cardiology and the European Atherosclerosis Society.

Dr George Gotsadze

Dr George Gotsadze is a founder and President of the Curatio International Foundation, a not-for-profit Georgian research institution established in 1994 to work on health system and policy issues in eastern European and central Asian countries. Since 2015, he has been Executive Director of Health Systems Global, the first international membership organization dedicated to promoting health systems research and related knowledge translation. He is also an associate professor at the School of Public Health at Ilia State University (Georgia). Until 2014, he served as Vice-Chair of the Technical Review Panel of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Dr Gotsadze has authored more than 50 publications, including peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

Professor Dr Patrick Jeurissen

Dr Patrick Jeurissen is Professor of Sustainable Health Care Systems at Radboud University Medical Center (the Netherlands) and Science Officer at the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. His expertise lies in the design and implementation of policies that specifically address issues of sustainability and affordability in health care. He has published over 100 scientific papers in the areas of finance, sustainability and affordability in health care, and has edited 2 books on these subjects. Dr Jeurissen is a sought-after speaker on national and international forums. He represents the Dutch Government at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and chairs their working party on the PaRIS project, a large survey on patient-reported outcomes among Member States. He has been a consultant for different governmental and international organizations, including for WHO on health-care reforms. His major interests are strategic policy-making, health-care finance and cost-containment policies, hospitals, for-profit providers and payers, mental health care, solidarity in health-care systems, and comparative health-care system research. He holds a doctorate in health economics from Erasmus University (the Netherlands). His 2010 dissertation covers for-profit hospital ownership in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Dr Anna V. Kontsevaya

Dr Anna V. Kontsevaya holds degrees in medicine and economics from Russian universities and a , and a Master of Health Economics, Outcomes and Management in Cardiovascular Sciences degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom). Her areas of research interest are public health, health promotion, the economics of health and investments in health. She has conducted methodological work with the Russian Ministry of Health on federal public health, health promotion and mass media campaigns, among other projects. She has also participated in several international studies, including the project “Cardiovascular disease in Russia: strengthening evidence about causes, mechanisms, prevention and treatment” at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (United Kingdom), and the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study and Anti-Coronavirus Therapies (ACT) trials at the Population Health Research Institute (Canada). Dr Kontsevaya has been a consultant to the United Nations Population Fund and WHO since 2013 in the area of health economics. She has also served as a lead economist in investment cases related to noncommunicable diseases (in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Turkey and Uzbekistan) and mental health (in the Philippines and Uzbekistan). She is Vice-Chair of the NCD Expert Group in the Northern Dimension Partnership in Public Health and Social Well-being.

Professor Orly Manor

Professor Orly Manor is a Professor of Biostatistics at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, Israel. She is also former Director of the Braun School, and led the Israel National Program for Quality Indicators in Community Healthcare from 2010 to 2017. Since 2014, she has served as Chairwoman of the Board of the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research. Professor Manor is the founder of the Israel Longitudinal Mortality Study. Her research interests include quality of care, health inequalities, the developmental origin of adult disease and methodological issues associated with longitudinal studies. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Hebrew University’s Rector’s Prize for outstanding faculty member. She has also been a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Stockholm University (Sweden) and Geneva University Hospitals (Switzerland).

Professor Charles Normand

Professor Charles Normand is Emeritus Professor of Health Policy and Management at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), and Professor of the Economics of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation at King’s College London (United Kingdom). For 13 years, he was Professor of Health Economics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (United Kingdom), and remains a visiting professor there. He has also worked at universities in Belfast, York and Stirling (United Kingdom). He was a civil servant in Northern Ireland for 4 years and has worked in hospital management, including as Chairman of the Board at Central Middlesex Hospital. He is currently on the board of St. James’s Hospital, Dublin. Professor Normand also sits on the Irish Health Research Board. His bachelor and doctorate degrees are in economics. Much of his work has been on the evaluation of treatments and services with a particular focus on heart disease and the major cancers, the implications of population ageing, and care at the end of life. He has carried out advisory work and research on health-care reform in the new democracies of central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and in Bangladesh, Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania. He has published widely on health economics and financing. He is former President of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, and former Chair of the Steering Committee of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.

Dr Oresta Piniazhko

Dr Piniazhko is an expert in health technology assessment (HTA) and pharmaceutical policy, and holds a doctorate in pharmacoeconomics. Since 2019, she has been Director of the HTA Department at the State Expert Center of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, where she oversees the management and implementation of the best international HTA practices in the Ukrainian health-care system. A dynamic communicator, she has been President of the Ukraine Regional Chapter of the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) since 2017, and was President of the ISPOR Ukraine Students Network from 2015 to 2017. Dr Piniazhko is also a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Business Education at Vadym Hetman Kyiv National Economics University (Ukraine).

Professor Walter Ricciardi

Professor Walter Ricciardi is Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (UCSC) (Italy), Scientific Adviser to the Italian Minister of Health for the Coronavirus Pandemic, Scientific Director of ICS Maugeri, President of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, President of the European Commission’s Mission Board for Cancer, and Coordinator of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Human Technopole Foundation. His is former President of the Italian National Institute of Health and former President of the European Public Health Association, and has represented Italy on the WHO Executive Board. He has also served as Head of the Department of Woman and Child Health and Public Health at the Agostino Gemelli University Policlinic at UCSC, and as President of the Third Section of the Superior Health Council of the Italian Ministry of Health. Professor Ricciardi is Editor of the European Journal of Public Health and the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice, and Founding Editor of the Italian Journal of Public Health and of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health. He received an honorary degree from Thomas Jefferson University (United States) and the title of Commander of the Italian Republic by decree of the Italian President.

Dr Jorge Simões

Dr Jorge Simões is Invited Full Professor of Health Policy and Health Care Systems at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Professor at University of Aveiro (Portugal). He is former President of the Portuguese National Health Council (2016–2018) and President of Portugal’s Health Regulatory Authority (2010–2016). Dr Simões led Portugal’s Health Systems in Transition project with the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, co-coordinated the development of the National Health Plan for 2011–2016, and coordinated a team evaluating public–private partnerships in hospitals in 2008–2009. Prior to this, he served as President of the Committee for the Sustainability of the Financing of the National Health Service (2006–2007) and Adviser to the President of Republic (1996 and 2006).

Professor Peter C. Smith

Professor Peter C. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Health Policy at Imperial College London and Professor of Global Health Economics at the University of York (United Kingdom). He is a mathematics graduate from the University of Oxford and started his academic career at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). He has worked and published in a number of disciplinary settings, including statistics, operational research and accountancy. His main work has been in the economics of health and the broader public services, and he is former Director of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. At Imperial College London, he launched and co-directed the Centre for Health Policy at the Institute of Global Health Innovation. Professor Smith has acted in numerous governmental advisory capacities within the United Kingdom, and has advised many overseas governments and international agencies including the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the Global Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and WHO. He continues to actively research the economic aspects of global health. His current interests include health system performance assessment with a focus on international comparison, the measurement and improvement of health system productivity, universal health coverage, and the optimization of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Camilla Stoltenberg

Dr Camilla Stoltenberg is Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH). She is a Norwegian medical doctor and epidemiologist who has served several years as both Director of the Division of Epidemiology and Deputy Director-General of the NIPH. The NIPH runs most of the centralized national health registries in Norway, large population-based cohorts and a research biobank. Since the late 1990s, Dr Stoltenberg has engaged in developing such infrastructures for research in Norway and internationally. She is a professor in the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Bergen (Norway). She holds a number of positions in Norway and internationally, including Chair of the Board of HelseOmsorg21, which is following up on the national strategy for health and care research in Norway; Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Arctic University of Norway; member of the Executive Board of EAT; and member of the Expert Review Group on Population and Public Health at the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom).

Dr Miklos Szócska

Dr Miklós Szócska graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Semmelweis University (Hungary) in 1989. He holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (United States) (1998), and a doctorate from Semmelweis University in the field of change management (2003). After graduation, he and his colleagues initiated the creation of the Health Services Management Training Centre (HSMTC), which was officially established in 1995. He served as Deputy Director of HSMTC from 1995 to 2000, when he was appointed Director. Between 2010 and 2014, Dr Szócska served as Minister of State for Health of the Hungarian Government. In 2014, he returned to serving as Director of HSMTC and became responsible for the Institute of Digital Health Sciences at Semmelweis University. In 2016, he was nominated by the Hungarian Government for the position of WHO Director-General. In July 2019, Dr Szócska was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health and Public Administration at Semmelweis University.