Welcome to the European Health Economics Association

EuHEA promotes cooperation among all national health economics associations and groups in Europe. It also aims to profile and foster health economics at European universities.

Boards

Executive Committee

Presidency

Mathias Kifmann, President (2022-2024)

Mathias Kifmann is Professor of Economics at the Department of Socioeconomics of the University of Hamburg and a member of the Hamburg Center for Health Economics. He is director of the M.Sc. program “Health Economics and Health Care Management”. Before joining the University of Hamburg, he was Professor of Public Economics and Social Policy at the University of Augsburg and a Lecturer at the University of Konstanz where he obtained his doctorate in Economics in 2001. Mathias’ research is focused on the design of social health insurance systems, the use of financial incentives in health care and the political economy of health care. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Health Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Public Choice. He has been an editor of the Journal of Health Economics since 2018. Together with Friedrich Breyer and Peter Zweifel he has written the textbook Health Economics. He belongs to the founding members of the German Health Economics Association. He has been involved in the organization of the European Health Economics Workshop, serving as organizer and member of the scientific committee.
Mathias is dedicated to academic cooperation between European health economists. He is committed to ensuring that EuHEA continues to promote health economics across Europe with high-quality conferences both for senior and young researchers and accessible at reasonable fees. In his experience, workshops are a very fruitful format for exchanging and discussing ideas. He therefore wants to encourage workshops on health economics topics relevant for European countries.

Aleksandra Torbica, President Elect (2022-2024)

Prof. Aleksandra Torbica, MSc, PhD is the President of Italian Health Economics Association (AIES). She is the Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences and the Director of Centre for Research for Health and Social Care Management (CERGAS) at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. She holds the MSc degree in Health Economics, Management and Policy from Bocconi University and PhD in Economics and Management of Public Organizations from University of Parma.
Aleksandra’s work is driven by ambition to generate knowledge that creates tangible social impact. Her research interests lie on the intersection between health economics, health policy and public health as she believes that creating bridges between different disciplines and methodologies is the only way to understand complex phenomena.
She obtained several research grants and coordinated important research projects funded by the European Commission and international donor agencies. She co-authored more than 100 papers in prestigious outlets in health economics, health services research and health policy fields. Since 2016, she is serving as Co-Editor of Value in Health journal. In the period from 2020 to 2021 she has acted as Special Advisor to the Chair of Pan European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, endorsed by WHO Regional Office for Europe.

Dorte Gyrd-Hansen, Past President (2022-2024)

Dorte Gyrd-Hansen is Professor of Health Economics at the Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, and is a visiting professor at the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø. Previous positions include professorships at the University of Queensland and Copenhagen Business School, and a position as Director of Research at the Danish Institute of Health Services Research.  Dorte Gyrd-Hansen’s research interests have evolved over the years from application of cost-effectiveness analysis on screening programmes for cancer diseases, to preference elicitation, experimental health economics and behavioural economics. Currently, her research focuses on demand- and supply side barriers to access to health care services. She is in particular interested in understanding citizens' and patients' health behaviours; and understanding how health professionals' allocate resources subject to various financial incentives. Dorte Gyrd-Hansen has 140 peer-reviewed publications in international journals including Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization. She has supervised/is supervising 20 PhD students on a broad range of topics within the area of health economics.  She has been an Associate Editor of Health Economics since 2016. Dorte Gyrd-Hansen has participated in several large scale European projects. Currently she is involved in the EU Marie Curie European Training Network program, Improving Quality of Care in Europe, which hosts 15 PhD students across 6 European countries.  She has been a member of the board of directors of the International Health Economics Association, the Arrow Award Commitee, the Norwegian Research Council and the Danish Research Council. She is engaged in influencing national health policy and sits on the Danish Scientific Council of Prevention.


Chair Early Career Committee

Katrin Zocher (2022-2024)

Katrin Zocher, PhD is University Assistant (postdoc) at the Health Economics Department at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. Her particular research interests focus on health care utilization of migrants and children from low socioeconomic families, as well as sustainable care for patients experiencing a disruption in their health care. In 2021, she took over the research position of the Upper Austrian Research Advisory Board, an organization that connects clinicians, local health insurers, health economists the Upper Austria Medical Association and officials of the state of Upper Austria, and whose purpose is to evaluate health care interventions and population health.


Other Members

Carine Franc (2020-2026)

Carine Franc has been an health economics researcher at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, in a social science and public health multidisciplinary department (Centre d’Epidémiologie et de Santé des Populations, CESP Inserm UMR 1018). She has been member of the executive committee of the French Health Economics Association since 2008 and serving as its treasurer since 2017. Since 2013, she has also been president of the scientific committee of the French Health Economists Conference (JESF), which brings together nearly 130 health economists every year.

Due to her involvement in the French College of Health Economists, Carine Franc has been involved in the EuHEA since its creation as a delegate. Fully convinced of the need to promote health economics in Europe, and even more so after the covid-19 crisis, she proposes her candidacy as ordinary member of EuHEA’s executive committee. She is particularly interested in the development of early career health economists and she attended with her PhD students all PhD Early Career Meetings.

Born in 1973 in Toulouse (south-west France), she studied public economics and microeconomics at the Toulouse School of Economics. She holds a PhD in Economics Sciences from Toulouse University of Social Sciences in 2000 focusing on “Social Protection and Redistribution”. She completed her “habilitation to supervise research” on agency problems in health economics context, in 2012 at the Paris-Dauphine University.

Her research focuses on the study of the effects of economic and non-economic incentives on individual behavior. Considering the provision of care, her research aims at investigating which mechanism (financial and non-financial) can help to improve the effectiveness of primary care. Considering the demand for care, she has studied the respective role of public and private health insurances, the impact of the design of insurance coverage on health care demand and on inequalities in the access to care.

Bruce Hollingsworth (2020-2026)

Bruce Hollingsworth is Professor of Health Economics at Lancaster University, UK and Director of Health Economics at Lancaster. Bruce was previously Director of the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University in Australia, where he remains Principal Research Fellow.

He has a BA(Hons) Economics, MSc Health Economics, and PhD focusing on economies of scope and efficiency in health services.

Bruce is investigator on a number of current large grants (£20m), and has over 150 publications, principally in the area of efficiency measurement with respect to the production of health and health care, social determinants of health, and the translation of research into practice.

He is an Editor of Health Economics, and has been an adviser to Government bodies and NGOs including the WHO, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and a Gates Foundation International Advisory Committee.

He runs the international health economics discussion/twitter groups (3,500 members), is an active member of health economics organisations worldwide, an invited speaker at international conferences and to Government bodies, is referee for over 40 journals, and several international grant bodies.

Bruce is particularly committed to the development of early career health economists, students, and health economics capacity internationally. He helped found the Australasian Workshops on Econometrics and Health Economics, and is Chair of the iHEA Student Prize Committee. He was an iHEA Board member, and helped lead the Strategic Review of iHEA (iHEA 2020) on the structure and future of iHEA. Bruce regularly attends EuHEA meetings, and PHD/ECR meetings, and is Co-Organiser of the UK HESG.

Anne Nolan (2023-2026)
Anne Nolan is a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research (ESRI) Institute in Dublin, and an Adjunct Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). She is also a Research Affiliate at the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at TCD, and on the Expert Advisory Group for the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study. She is the current Past President (2022 – 2024) of the Irish Economics Association. Her main research interest is health economics, with a particular focus on the social determinants of health, population ageing and healthcare financing and access.

Executive Secretary

Stefan Boes (2020-2026)

Stefan Boes is Professor of Health Economics at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and Director of the Center for Health, Policy and Economics (CHPE). He is currently acting as Vice Principal of the Department of Health Sciences and Medicine, is Head of the section Health Sciences and Health Policy and leads the development of the undergraduate program in health sciences at the University of Lucerne. Before coming to Lucerne, he was an Assistant Professor of Econometrics at the University of Bern and a Lecturer in Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Zurich, where he obtained his PhD in Economics in 2007. Stefan Boes’ research focuses on topics in applied health economics, econometrics, and policy evaluation. He is particularly interested in studying health-related behaviors and decisions, including health insurance choices, inequalities in health and related outcomes, the interaction between education and health, and design-based health econometrics. Recently, he also started working on topics related to evidence-informed policy-making, including information infrastructures and the development of the Swiss Learning Health System. He has published in international journals such as the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, the Journal of Urban Economics, or Empirical Economics. He is Founding Member and Vice President of the Swiss Society of Health Economics (sggö) since 2016 and was Academic Director of the International Doctoral Courses in Health Economics and Policy (2017 -2019), an advanced PhD course program in health economics and policy coordinated by the sggö.



Finance Committee

Wolfgang Greiner, Germany, (2022-2024)

Wolfgang Greiner, PhD is Professor for health economics and health care management at the School of Public Health of the University Bielefeld, Germany. He has published a substantial number of articles in peer-reviewed health economic and medical journals. His particular interests focussed on international health insurance issues and methodological questions concerning economic evaluations of health services and quality of life measurement as well as presenting results of health economic evaluations. He was appointed to the Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System of the German Federal Government in 2010. In 2015 he became member of the scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). Since 2001 he is the managing editor of the European Journal of Health Economics. In 2013 he was assigned as Editorial Board member for PharmacoEconomics and of “Gesundheitsökonomie & Qualitätsmanagement”, the leading German health economic journal.

Mickaël Hiligsmann (2022-2024)

Mickaël Hiligsmann is Associate Professor in Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment at the Department of Health Services Research, CAPHRI Care and Public Health Research Institute, Maastricht University (the Netherlands). He holds a PhD in Health, Medicine and Life Sciences from Maastricht University (2015), a PhD in Medical Sciences (2010), as well as a master in Public Health (2006) and a master in Economics (2003) from the University of Liège. As a researcher, he has more than 15 years of experience in health economic evaluation including cost-effectiveness analyses, decision-analytic modelling, valuation of health care (e.g. discrete-choice experiments, best-worst scaling) and medication adherence. He has been co-promotor of about 20 PhD students and is senior lecturer in HTA and health economic courses. He is currently author of more than 225 peer-reviewed articles and he is regularly invited as expert/lecturer and is part of/has chaired several international working groups including ISPOR special interest groups, IOF and ESCEO working groups. He has also been involved in Evidence Review Group for NICE appraisal, is member of the editorial board of several international journals and is board member of the Dutch Association for Health Economics. He was initiator, co-chairman and chair of the scientific committee of the EuHea 2018 conference organized by Maastricht University.