Welcome Dr Kalipso Chalkidou—CGD’s New Director of Global Health Policy

I am delighted to welcome Dr. Kalipso Chalkidou as the new director of CGD’s Global Health Policy program and a CGD senior fellow. With a wealth of frontline policy experience, academic credentials and honors from multiple respected institutions, as well as more than 70 peer reviewed publications, Kalipso stood out as a leader and a scholar from a crowded, international pool of highly qualified candidates. She is uniquely placed to build upon the influential work of Amanda Glassman (now promoted to CGD’s Chief Operating Officer and senior fellow in global health), as well as driving forward CGD’s work on important and emerging frontiers in global health policy and development.

Based in our London offices, Kalipso will be a regular face in Washington. She joins us from Imperial College London’s Institute for Global Health, where she worked to help governments build technical and institutional capacity for using evidence to inform health policy as they move towards Universal Healthcare Coverage (the topic of CGD’s forthcoming book What’s In, What’s Out: Designing Benefits for Universal Health Coverage).

Prior to her time at Imperial College, Kalipso worked for the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). She established and led NICE International, providing advice to governments and governmental agencies around the world on the use of evidence and social values in making clinical and policy decisions.

During her time at NICE, she led the team that set up the international Decision Support Initiative, a multi-million dollar, multi-country network scoped out by CGD’s Priority-Setting Institutions Working Group. Kalipso will lead our continuing work on this important and growing institution, expanding also on CGD’s research on benefit package design, and her own prior work on health technology assessment, as well examining new models of development finance in global health.

With shrinking aid budgets, growing skepticism amongst richer countries as to the value of aid, and a drive to raise more domestic resources to invest in health systems across low- and middle-income countries, finding new financing mechanisms and understanding how to allocate resources efficiently and rationally is a priority across the world.

I am excited to welcome Kalipso and confident that she will help ensure CGD stays at the forefront of research into the most important issues in global health policy in the years to come.