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Marcella Alsan: I am honored to stand for election for IHEA Director for Northern America. Currently, I am the Annie and Ned Lamont Professor of International Studies in the Department of Economics at Stanford, Thomas J. Davis, Jr. Faculty Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Professor by Courtesy of Health Policy at Stanford Medical School and Founder of the Health Inequality Lab.
I received my PhD in Economics from Harvard University and completed an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, following an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health and an MD from Loyola University. My background as a physician in infectious disease serving patients in low- and middle-income countries and Indigenous and urban U.S. communities informs my research on health inequality and my commitment to collaborative, globally engaged scholarship.
For this work, I am deeply honored to have twice received IHEA’s Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the Best Published Paper in Health Economics, which I regard as the highest recognition of scholarship in our field. In gratitude, I have sought to give back through service to IHEA — most notably as a member of the Arrow Award Committee — and through complementary roles with the American Society of Health Economists, where I helped organize a Health Equity Pre-Conference and a Plenary Keynote on a legal right to healthcare. My service has extended to the National Academy of Medicine, where I was a committee member and chairperson on two commissioned reports: Improving Clinical Trial Diversity and Building a National Preventive Behavioral Health Infrastructure for the United States. The latter effort drew on international expertise, including experts from the UK’s NHS Talk Therapy initiative, Headspace in Australia, and the 502 in New Zealand. Through these experiences, I have worked to foster fresh ideas through respectful collaboration and consensus-building.
I am seeking election to the IHEA Board to deepen that service, make IHEA my primary focus of health economics engagement, and learn from colleagues around the world. If elected, I will focus on advancing inclusivity and global engagement within health economics. While much of our field’s research draws on U.S. data and policy, there is tremendous value in learning from diverse settings which often have a stronger track record of meeting the twin goals of efficiency and equity in healthcare delivery. I hope to help broaden that lens by cultivating inclusive networks that generate the best evidence on safeguarding the health of an increasingly aging population while meeting fiscal obligations. I am also committed to demystifying the publication process and expanding access to health economics training. Among the initiatives I would champion are a Health Economics Boot Camp designed to recruit scholars from low-income regions and a Mini-Medical School to help deepen economists’ understanding of the realities of healthcare delivery.
Overall, my goal is to promote initiatives that engage underrepresented scholars and foster cross-country partnerships, ensuring that all who are committed to improving health through economics have the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from our IHEA community.