Speaker Biographies
Panel #1 – Payment/Financing
Dominic Hodgkin, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, at Brandeis University. He is also a Co-Investigator at the Brandeis/Harvard NIDA Center to Improve System Performance of Substance Use Disorder Treatment, located at the Heller School’s Schneider Institute for Behavioral Health. Dr. Hodgkin is a health economist with over 25 years of experience in health policy analysis and research in academic settings. Most of his research focuses on the effects of different organizing and financing approaches in health care, particularly addressing mental and substance use disorders. Dr. Hodgkin’s recent work has included studies of prescriber decision-making for treatment of depression and bipolar disorders, and payment approaches for substance use disorder treatment.
Dan Chisholm, Ph.D. is a social scientist with interests and expertise in public health, mental health policy and economics, and health systems research. He is currently working as a Mental Health Specialist in the Office of the Director, Department of Mental Health and Substance Use, WHO Headquarters Office, Geneva, Switzerland. He formerly served as Programme Manager for Mental Health in the WHO Regional Office for Europe between 2017-2021, and before that as a health systems advisor and health economist at WHO Headquarters Office from 2000-2017. His main areas of work at WHO include development and monitoring of mental health plans and policies, technical assistance to Member States on mental health system strengthening, and analysis of the costs and cost-effectiveness of strategies for reducing the global burden of mental health conditions.
Alex Dopp, Ph.D. (he/him) is a behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation. Also, an implementation scientist and child clinical psychologist, he studies the use of research evidence, and related policy implications, for improving youth mental health and substance use services using interdisciplinary, community-engaged team science approaches. He has rare dual expertise in behavioral health services and economic evaluation, which has allowed him to conduct research on "upstream" influences (financing strategies) and "downstream" outcomes (economic impact) of the implementation of evidence-based youth behavioral health treatments. He received his Ph.D. in child clinical psychology from the University of Missouri.
Marylou Gilbert, J.D. (she/her) is the program manager for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, program manager of the Pardee RAND Graduate School's Community-Partnered Policy and Action stream, coordinator for the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles and a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. Her research focus has been on adolescent health, mental health, substance use, community organizations and persons experiencing homelessness. She received her J.D. and M.A. in Latin American studies and public health from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Plenary A: The Economics of Health Equity
Darrell Gaskin, Ph.D. is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy and Director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Gaskin is a health services researcher and health economist. He is an internationally recognized expert in health and healthcare disparities. He seeks to identify and understand how contextual factors influence access to care, quality of care and health outcomes for minority, low socioeconomic status, and other vulnerable populations. His research strives to develop and promulgate policies and practices that address the social determinants of health and promote equity in health and well-being.
Panel #2 – Behavioral Economics
Kevin Volpp, M.D., Ph.D. is the founding Director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) and the Mark V. Pauly President’s Distinguished Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has led CHIBE since its inception turning it into an entity which became 1 of 2 original NIH Centers on behavioral economics and health and that involves more than 90 faculty members and trainees. Dr. Volpp’s work focuses on developing and testing innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics in improving patient health behavior and increasing health system value by influencing provider performance.
Marisa Domino, Ph.D. is Professor and the Executive Director of the Center for Health Information and Research (CHiR) in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. CHiR is the college’s multidisciplinary unit that serves and collaborates with individuals and organizations that need comprehensive health information and data analysis for public, private and research uses. Dr. Domino earned her PhD in health economics from The Johns Hopkins University and completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy. She has decades of experience analyzing Medicaid and other health policies using advanced econometric and statistical techniques. Her research generally focuses on individuals with mental illness, substance use disorders, or other chronic conditions.
Kate Orkin, D. Phil, is Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Supernumerary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford University. Before this, she was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. Kate did her MPhil and DPhil at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, finishing in 2015. Kate is an applied microeconomist, working in labor, public, development and behavioural economics. She mainly runs large field experiments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Africa, developing and testing real-world interventions in partnership with governments and NGOs. Her research is in three areas: frictions in urban developing country labor markets that prevent young people finding work and interventions that can reduce these frictions; the role of mental health in labor market decisions and how treatments for mental health improve labor market outcomes; and the design of cash transfer and wage subsidy programs.
Plenary B: Biases and Mental Models in Health Care
Varun Gauri, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Principal, Venn Advisors, and Lecturer of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, where he teaches courses on ethics, behavioral public policy, and international development. Previously, he was for two decades an economist in the World Bank’s research department, where he founded and headed the World Bank’s behavioral science unit. He was also Co-Director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. He has served on the Technical Advisory Group for Behavioral Insights at the World Health Organization, the Advisory Board of the Behavioral Policy Association, the Advisory Board of the Behavioral Economics in Action Centre at the University of Toronto, a member of World Economic Forum Council on Behavior, and the editorial boards of the journals Behavioral Public Policy, Health and Human Rights, and BMJ Global Health. His publications have appeared in journals such as PNAS, American Political Science Review, Journal of Political Philosophy, and World Bank Economic Review. His current research addresses behavioral economics, human rights, and social policy in developing countries.
Panel #3 – Social Determinants of Health
Victoria Baranov, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores how health, psychological factors, and norms interact with poverty and economic development. Her interdisciplinary research combines large-scale field experiments, lab-in-the-field experiments, and the latest econometric techniques with innovative research design and measurement to explore (1) the economic consequences of mental illness, (2) the direct and indirect effects of the expansion of AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, and (3) the relationship between gender norms, violence, and the economics of the household. For example, Victoria's recent work has focused on maternal depression and its implications for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. Victoria received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago 2013. She is a deputy director of the Centre for Market Design, a research affiliate at J-PAL, CEPR and CAGE, and a research fellow at the Life Course Centre and IZA.
Bohdan Nosyk, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and St. Paul’s Hospital CANFAR Chair in HIV/AIDS Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Health Economic Research Unit at the Center for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dr. Nosyk’s research seeks to inform complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of HIV/AIDS and substance use disorders. He combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric and biostatistical analyses of health administrative data in his research work.
Marjorie Baldwin, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Economics in the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. She is a health economist with an international reputation for her research on employment discrimination against workers with disabilities (and, in particular, workers with mental disorders) and for her research on the costs and outcomes of work-related injuries. She is the author/co-author of more than 50 articles and book chapters on these topics. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, and the National Institute of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, among others. She is currently principal investigator for a four-year study on disclosure of serious mental illness in the workplace, sponsored by NIMH.
Plenary C: Using Value-Based Insurance Design to Increase Use of High Value Care, Enhance Equity, and Eliminate Low Value Services
A. Mark Fendrick, M.D. is a Professor of Internal Medicine in the School of Medicine and a Professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Dr. Fendrick conceptualized and coined the term Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID) and currently directs the V-BID Center at the University of Michigan, the leading advocate for development, implementation, and evaluation of innovative health benefit plans. His research focuses on how clinician payment and consumer engagement initiatives impact access to care, quality of care, and health care costs.