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

Aleksandra Torbica, President (2024-2026)

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.

Céu Mateus, President-Elect (2024-2026)

Céu Mateus is Professor of Health Economics in the Division of Health Research at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Public Health-Health Economics from the National School of Public Health, Nova University of Lisbon in Portugal, an MSc in European Social Policy Analysis from Bath University in the UK, and graduated in Economics from ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Lisbon University in Portugal. Between 2001 and 2014 she was Assistant Professor of Health Economics at the National School of Public Health at University Nova of Lisbon. She worked for the Institute of Management and IT (Ministry of Health) in the Department of Information Systems Development from 1995 until 2000, where she was the Executive responsible for the Financing System/Classification System in Diagnoses Related Groups. She has over 25 years of experience in research and has developed her expertise around economic evaluation of health technologies and interventions, efficiency measurement, equity and quality of life. She has been involved in several scientific associations in the field of health care such as PCSI, EuHEA and the Portuguese Chapter of ISPOR. She was the President of the Portuguese Health Economics Association between 2017-2023.

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Mathias Kifmann, Past President (2024-2026)

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.


Chair Early Career Committee

Mervi Rantsi (2024-2026)

Mervi Rantsi, PhD, is a University Lecturer at the Department of Health and Social Management, Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, University of Eastern Finland. She is a health economist interested in implementing evidence-based practice, with research primarily related to older people. She aims to strengthen implementation research with health economic applications and methods. In her PhD thesis, she evaluated the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different implementation strategies. Current projects include a registry study evaluating the implementation of the Finnish clinical guideline of memory disorders and the influence of physicians’ peer networks on psychotropic prescribing in the MEDIFF project.


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

Virva Hyttinen-Huotari (2024-2026)

Virva Hyttinen-Huotari, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Health and Social Management, Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, University of Eastern Finland. She is a health economist interested in register-based research. In her PhD thesis, she studied how potentially inappropriate medications in older people are associated with health care use, costs, and mortality. After the dissertation, she has continued to focus on older people and medication use, increasingly focused on physicians’ decision-making and system-level implementation evaluation using registry data and quasi-experimental methods. She is a Principal Investigator in two research projects (MEDIFF and GuideGap, both funded by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland).

Beatriz Rodríguez Sánchez (2024-2026)

Beatriz Rodríguez Sánchez is an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics, Public Economics and Political Economy at the Faculty of Law at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her primary research interests are in health economics, public policy evaluation, health policy, econometrics, and the economics of ageing. She has published her research in scientific journals such as The European Journal of Health Economics, Value in Health, Economics & Human Biology, Diabetes Care, Health Economics Review, and PLoS One. She holds a Master of Science in Health Economics from the University of York (United Kingdom) and a PhD in economics, specializing on health economics, from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands).

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