PARTICIPANT BIOS
Han Bleichrodt is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, Spain. Before he was Full Professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. His main areas of research are behavioral economics and health economics, in particular decision under risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice and the measurement of quality of life. He has published 100 articles in peer reviewed journals like Econometrica, American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Health Economics. He has served on the boards of various journals and was the department editor of Decision Analysis at Management Science from 2014-2018. In 2025 his textbook on Behavioral Economics will appear. Han holds a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and MScs from Erasmus University and the University of York.
John Broome is an Honorary Professor at the ANU, and Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. In the past he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. Throughout his academic life he has maintained an interest in the value of life; his main theoretical work on the subject is his book Weighing Lives. As one application of the value of life, he has worked on the ethics of climate change; he has written two books on this subject and he was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has also written on various topics within ethical theory, and on the theory of normativity.
Susan Chilton is Professor of Economics in the Newcastle University Business School. The academic core of her research is applied welfare economics, centering on the use of surveys and experimental situations to understand how individuals make decisions affecting their economic welfare. The work is based in environmental economics, safety economics and health economics.
Bronwyn Croxson is the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s Chief Economist. She has a background in research and teaching public and institutional economics, and has been a public servant since moving back to New Zealand about 20 years ago. Since then she has held positions in The Treasury, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health. She maintains academic connections, to support her knowledge of developments in evidence and methods, and to support evidence-based decisions. Bronwyn leads a small team in the Ministry, focussed on building economics capability, using economic insights and evidence to support colleagues’ work programmes and doing as much analysis as we can using health and cross-agency data. Bronwyn has a Masters in Commerce from the University of Auckland, and an Masters of Philosophy and PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where she also held a teaching position.
Cam Donaldson FRSE is Emeritus Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), where, from 2010-24, he held the Yunus Chair and, from 2016-21, he was Pro Vice Chancellor Research. He is also Professor at Australian National University. Cam previously held the Health Foundation Chair at Newcastle University and Svare Chair at University of Calgary, and was a Professor at Aberdeen University where he was Deputy Director of the Health Economics Research Unit from 1991 to 1998. Renowned for developing methods for economic appraisal of health interventions and founding GCU’s Yunus Centre for Social Business & Health, Cam has published around 300 refereed journal articles and authored/edited 7 books, his research having attracted £30m in competitive funding over his career (with around £11m as principal investigator). Cam’s work has been recognised through a Public Services Fellowship funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and senior investigatorships from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the UK’s National Institute for Health Research. In 2024, Cam was listed by Research.com in the top 300 Economics and Finance Scientists (32 in the UK) all-time, by citation and publications and, in 2022, was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Dorte Gyrd-Hansen is Director of the Danish Centre for Health Economics, DaCHE, and Professor of Health Economics at Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Previous positions include professorships at the Department of Business and Economics (SDU), at University of Queensland and at Copenhagen Business School, and a position as Director of Research at Danish Institute of Health Services Research. Dorte is member of the Danish Medicines Council that makes decisions on the introduction of new medicines in Danish hospitals and general practice. She is co-editor of Health Economics. Dorte’s research focuses on health economic issues very broadly, but a particular interest is behavioral economics and stated preference methods. Her research is based on a broad range of data including survey data, registry data and laboratory experiments. Her focus is studying patients’, citizens’ and health professional’s behaviors and preferences. This includes for example understanding factors influencing patients’ health resilience, deciphering citizen’s responses to willingness-to-pay questions and disclosing health professionals’ allocative decisions when facing resource constraints.
James K. Hammitt is Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and Associate Faculty member at the Toulouse School of Economics. His research and teaching concern the development and application of benefit-cost decision, and risk analysis to health and environmental policy. Topics include long-term environmental issues, such as global climate change and stratospheric-ozone depletion, and characterization of social preferences over health risks using revealed-preference, stated-preference, and health-utility methods. He has served on six U.S. National Academies of Sciences panels and more than a dozen advisory committees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies. He began his career at the RAND Corporation and received achievement awards from the Society for Risk Analysis and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.
Emily Lancsar is a Professor and Chief Health Economist in the Australian Government's Department of Health and Aged Care since April 2024. Prior to this, Emily was Head of the Department of Health Economics Wellbeing and Society at the Australian National University (ANU). She served as Associate Dean (Policy and Practice) in the College of Health and Medicine at the ANU from 2020–2022, where she remains a Professor. Emily has also held academic appointments at Monash University (where she remains an Adjunct Professor), the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom, the University of Sydney and University of Technology, Sydney. Emily has published in excess of 100 peer reviewed journal articles, served on editorial boards of a number of journals, including as Associate Editor of Health Economics, held numerous Australian and international grants and fellowships, was a member of a number of government advisory committees and served as Vice President of the Australian Health Economics Society.
Kirsten Mann is a Research Fellow in the Australian National University’s School of Philosophy. Her research interests include normative ethics, formal approaches to ethics and the ethics of public policy. Her PhD research, completed in 2024, developed and defended an account of limited aggregation in distributive ethics.
Chris Mullin is Chief Economist and Chief Analyst at the United Kingdom Government’s Department of Health and Social Care. Since his appointment in 2016, he has overseen major analytical programmes across public health, productivity, workforce and social care reform, expanded the UK’s health and care statistics portfolio and led the UK’s health analysis throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He has previously held senior economic and policy positions in the National Health Service, UK Prime Minister’s Office and His Majesty’s Treasury, with diplomatic experience at the International Energy Agency, leading on climate change. He currently chairs the OECD’s Health Committee.
Jytte Seested Nielsen is a Professor of Economics at Newcastle University. Her main research area is economics of safety policy and risk and thus the fundamental issue of valuing (risks to) human life. In addition, her research focuses on methodological issues in stated preference techniques and how the use of economic experiments can contribute to the development of more robust methods for policy evaluation. She joined Newcastle University in September 2011, first as a Lecturer until 2014, Senior Lecturer until 2020, and Reader until 2024. Before coming to the UK, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (Institute of Public Health – The Research Unit of Health Economics) where she also completed her PhD in 2008.
Jan Abel Olsen is now an Emeritus Professor, after 25 years as professor of health economics and health services research in the Department of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø, Norway. For the past 12 years he was Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, Australia, and part time researcher in The Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Jan Abel appreciates his wide internation network of collaborators, resulting from his affiliations as adjunct professor and visiting professor at universities in Aberdeen, London, Melbourne, Milano, Oslo and York.
His eclectic research interests include: Measurement and valuation of health and wellbeing; Health behaviours; Determinants of health; Efficiency vs equality in health and healthcare; Healthcare financing; Medical practice variations. Extensive research outputs appear in the top field journals; Journal of Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, Health Economics, as well as more specialised journals when relevant. An interest in the wider subject area of health economics is signified by his three books, including Principles in Health Economics and Policy, Oxford University Press, 2017.
Jan Abel has served as a member of Government appointed commissions on healthcare priority setting and has contributed to the development of current Norwegian guidelines for Health Technology Assessments.
Katie Steele FAHA is a Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She arrived at the ANU in 2016, having spent eight years in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Her research spans the different aspects of rational or wise decision-making, both for individuals and collectives, including the representation and management of uncertainty and notions of individual and social welfare. Her current project is about how we should best understand the popular concepts of ‘precaution’ and ‘sustainability’ in the context of public decision making and priority setting. Katie has been a Principal Investigator on a number of grant projects, most recently the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project hosted at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. In 2021 she received an ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence. In 2023 she delivered the Parfit Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford. She is currently an Editor of the journal Economics & Philosophy.
John Quiggin is a VC Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and many other learned societies and institutions. He has produced over 1500 publications, including six books and over 200 refereed journal articles, in fields including decision theory, environmental economics, production economics, and the theory of economic growth. He has also written on policy topics including climate change, micro-economic reform, privatisation, employment policy and the management of the Murray-Darling river system. His latest book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work so Well and Why they can Fail so Badly, was released in 2019 by Princeton University Press.
Han Bleichrodt is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, Spain. Before he was Full Professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. His main areas of research are behavioral economics and health economics, in particular decision under risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice and the measurement of quality of life. He has published 100 articles in peer reviewed journals like Econometrica, American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Health Economics. He has served on the boards of various journals and was the department editor of Decision Analysis at Management Science from 2014-2018. In 2025 his textbook on Behavioral Economics will appear. Han holds a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and MScs from Erasmus University and the University of York.
John Broome is an Honorary Professor at the ANU, and Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. In the past he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. Throughout his academic life he has maintained an interest in the value of life; his main theoretical work on the subject is his book Weighing Lives. As one application of the value of life, he has worked on the ethics of climate change; he has written two books on this subject and he was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has also written on various topics within ethical theory, and on the theory of normativity.
Susan Chilton is Professor of Economics in the Newcastle University Business School. The academic core of her research is applied welfare economics, centering on the use of surveys and experimental situations to understand how individuals make decisions affecting their economic welfare. The work is based in environmental economics, safety economics and health economics.
Bronwyn Croxson is the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s Chief Economist. She has a background in research and teaching public and institutional economics, and has been a public servant since moving back to New Zealand about 20 years ago. Since then she has held positions in The Treasury, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health. She maintains academic connections, to support her knowledge of developments in evidence and methods, and to support evidence-based decisions. Bronwyn leads a small team in the Ministry, focussed on building economics capability, using economic insights and evidence to support colleagues’ work programmes and doing as much analysis as we can using health and cross-agency data. Bronwyn has a Masters in Commerce from the University of Auckland, and an Masters of Philosophy and PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where she also held a teaching position.
Cam Donaldson FRSE is Emeritus Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), where, from 2010-24, he held the Yunus Chair and, from 2016-21, he was Pro Vice Chancellor Research. He is also Professor at Australian National University. Cam previously held the Health Foundation Chair at Newcastle University and Svare Chair at University of Calgary, and was a Professor at Aberdeen University where he was Deputy Director of the Health Economics Research Unit from 1991 to 1998. Renowned for developing methods for economic appraisal of health interventions and founding GCU’s Yunus Centre for Social Business & Health, Cam has published around 300 refereed journal articles and authored/edited 7 books, his research having attracted £30m in competitive funding over his career (with around £11m as principal investigator). Cam’s work has been recognised through a Public Services Fellowship funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and senior investigatorships from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the UK’s National Institute for Health Research. In 2024, Cam was listed by Research.com in the top 300 Economics and Finance Scientists (32 in the UK) all-time, by citation and publications and, in 2022, was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Dorte Gyrd-Hansen is Director of the Danish Centre for Health Economics, DaCHE, and Professor of Health Economics at Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Previous positions include professorships at the Department of Business and Economics (SDU), at University of Queensland and at Copenhagen Business School, and a position as Director of Research at Danish Institute of Health Services Research. Dorte is member of the Danish Medicines Council that makes decisions on the introduction of new medicines in Danish hospitals and general practice. She is co-editor of Health Economics. Dorte’s research focuses on health economic issues very broadly, but a particular interest is behavioral economics and stated preference methods. Her research is based on a broad range of data including survey data, registry data and laboratory experiments. Her focus is studying patients’, citizens’ and health professional’s behaviors and preferences. This includes for example understanding factors influencing patients’ health resilience, deciphering citizen’s responses to willingness-to-pay questions and disclosing health professionals’ allocative decisions when facing resource constraints.
James K. Hammitt is Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and Associate Faculty member at the Toulouse School of Economics. His research and teaching concern the development and application of benefit-cost decision, and risk analysis to health and environmental policy. Topics include long-term environmental issues, such as global climate change and stratospheric-ozone depletion, and characterization of social preferences over health risks using revealed-preference, stated-preference, and health-utility methods. He has served on six U.S. National Academies of Sciences panels and more than a dozen advisory committees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies. He began his career at the RAND Corporation and received achievement awards from the Society for Risk Analysis and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.
Emily Lancsar is a Professor and Chief Health Economist in the Australian Government's Department of Health and Aged Care since April 2024. Prior to this, Emily was Head of the Department of Health Economics Wellbeing and Society at the Australian National University (ANU). She served as Associate Dean (Policy and Practice) in the College of Health and Medicine at the ANU from 2020–2022, where she remains a Professor. Emily has also held academic appointments at Monash University (where she remains an Adjunct Professor), the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom, the University of Sydney and University of Technology, Sydney. Emily has published in excess of 100 peer reviewed journal articles, served on editorial boards of a number of journals, including as Associate Editor of Health Economics, held numerous Australian and international grants and fellowships, was a member of a number of government advisory committees and served as Vice President of the Australian Health Economics Society.
Kirsten Mann is a Research Fellow in the Australian National University’s School of Philosophy. Her research interests include normative ethics, formal approaches to ethics and the ethics of public policy. Her PhD research, completed in 2024, developed and defended an account of limited aggregation in distributive ethics.
Chris Mullin is Chief Economist and Chief Analyst at the United Kingdom Government’s Department of Health and Social Care. Since his appointment in 2016, he has overseen major analytical programmes across public health, productivity, workforce and social care reform, expanded the UK’s health and care statistics portfolio and led the UK’s health analysis throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He has previously held senior economic and policy positions in the National Health Service, UK Prime Minister’s Office and His Majesty’s Treasury, with diplomatic experience at the International Energy Agency, leading on climate change. He currently chairs the OECD’s Health Committee.
Jytte Seested Nielsen is a Professor of Economics at Newcastle University. Her main research area is economics of safety policy and risk and thus the fundamental issue of valuing (risks to) human life. In addition, her research focuses on methodological issues in stated preference techniques and how the use of economic experiments can contribute to the development of more robust methods for policy evaluation. She joined Newcastle University in September 2011, first as a Lecturer until 2014, Senior Lecturer until 2020, and Reader until 2024. Before coming to the UK, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (Institute of Public Health – The Research Unit of Health Economics) where she also completed her PhD in 2008.
Jan Abel Olsen is now an Emeritus Professor, after 25 years as professor of health economics and health services research in the Department of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø, Norway. For the past 12 years he was Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, Australia, and part time researcher in The Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Jan Abel appreciates his wide internation network of collaborators, resulting from his affiliations as adjunct professor and visiting professor at universities in Aberdeen, London, Melbourne, Milano, Oslo and York.
His eclectic research interests include: Measurement and valuation of health and wellbeing; Health behaviours; Determinants of health; Efficiency vs equality in health and healthcare; Healthcare financing; Medical practice variations. Extensive research outputs appear in the top field journals; Journal of Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, Health Economics, as well as more specialised journals when relevant. An interest in the wider subject area of health economics is signified by his three books, including Principles in Health Economics and Policy, Oxford University Press, 2017.
Jan Abel has served as a member of Government appointed commissions on healthcare priority setting and has contributed to the development of current Norwegian guidelines for Health Technology Assessments.
Katie Steele FAHA is a Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She arrived at the ANU in 2016, having spent eight years in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Her research spans the different aspects of rational or wise decision-making, both for individuals and collectives, including the representation and management of uncertainty and notions of individual and social welfare. Her current project is about how we should best understand the popular concepts of ‘precaution’ and ‘sustainability’ in the context of public decision making and priority setting. Katie has been a Principal Investigator on a number of grant projects, most recently the Climate Ethics and Future Generations project hosted at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. In 2021 she received an ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence. In 2023 she delivered the Parfit Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford. She is currently an Editor of the journal Economics & Philosophy.
John Quiggin is a VC Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and many other learned societies and institutions. He has produced over 1500 publications, including six books and over 200 refereed journal articles, in fields including decision theory, environmental economics, production economics, and the theory of economic growth. He has also written on policy topics including climate change, micro-economic reform, privatisation, employment policy and the management of the Murray-Darling river system. His latest book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work so Well and Why they can Fail so Badly, was released in 2019 by Princeton University Press.
