Allison Portnoy CV- Click Here!
I am honored to be considered to join the International Health Economics Association (IHEA) Board of Directors as an Early Career Researcher from the Global North. I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. I have been an active member of IHEA since 2013, which was not only my first IHEA conference, but also my first academic conference in general. I have contributed to IHEA as both a presenter and a moderator. Additionally, I have been a member of the Immunization Economics Special Interest Group during its tenure with IHEA, including lead organization of the pre-Congress virtual meeting for IHEA 2021.Â
Over the past thirteen years, as a health-focused economist and economic modeler, I have contributed to and led a number of studies on the impact and value of vaccination programs in high-burden countries. My research has focused on economic evaluation and public health policy, simulation modeling, health equity, and the impact of vaccination on population health and economic outcomes. I have 21 first-authored and 3 senior-authored papers (of 49 peer-reviewed original research articles), and six active grants as principal investigator from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health), Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Open Philanthropy, BU/BMC Cancer Center, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
To highlight a few areas of my research, I have conducted policy-focused studies on human papillomavirus (HPV), measles, and tuberculosis (TB) vaccines. In HPV, I evaluated the cost-effectiveness of a potential switch of the routine HPV vaccination program from bivalent to nonavalent HPV vaccine to inform future priority-setting in Norway. In measles, after developing a methodology for estimating measles case fatality ratios–a critical input for economic evaluation–I was awarded a BMGF grant to revise and improve this estimation framework, guiding the work of a doctoral student and providing the estimation framework to the wider research community as an open-access package. In TB, I led economic analyses on a WHO-funded study to estimate the broader health and economic impacts of novel TB vaccines to make the case for continued investment and support a range of decisions for development and adoption by global and country stakeholders.
As an early career researcher, I have a trajectory of impactful, funded research on the health and economic impact of HPV, TB, and measles vaccines and the value of vaccination more broadly. My experience positions me to contribute to the board of directors of IHEA, which has been an important part of my professional endeavors for almost the entirety of my academic career. In particular, I have grown with IHEA as a pre-doctoral student, doctoral candidate, post-doctoral fellow, and now early career faculty, so I have a breadth of perspectives to bring to the board on behalf of the IHEA membership. Thank you for your consideration!