Keynote Speakers

It gives us great pleasure to announce two renowned keynote speakers:

Keynote: Plenary 1, 15 July 2026

Han Bleichrodt

Han Bleichrodt is a Full Professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, specializing in behavioral and health economics. His research centers on resolving the tension between descriptive modelling and normative analysis. Han Bleichrodt has published more than 100 articles in journals like Econometerica, American Economic Review, Management Science, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.

According to Elsevier’s global citation rankings, Professor Bleichrodt is among the top 1% of researchers worldwide in both Health Policy and Economics. In 2025 his textbook on Behavioral Economics appeared. He has held chaired professorships at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Australian National University. At Erasmus University Rotterdam, he founded and led the departments of Health Economics and Behavioral Economics and served as Department Editor at Management Science (2014–2018).

Keynote: Plenary 2, 16 July 2026

Mylène Lagarde

Mylène Lagarde is a Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she has been since 2016. Before that, she was based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her work lies at the intersection of health economics, development economics, and health policy.

Her research uses an economic lens to understand the decisions made by healthcare providers and patients, and how those decisions shape the performance of health systems in low-income settings. In her studies, she explores the role of incentives and preferences on healthcare workers' decisions to understand the availability and quality of care provided. She also examines the effect of price, subsidies and information frictions on the uptake of health services.

To answer these questions, she employs a range of experimental methods – from choice experiments to lab-in-the-field and randomised trials – grounded in extensive primary data collection across a range of countries, from South Africa and Ghana to Zambia, Thailand and El Salvador.

She has published papers in leading journals in health economics, development economics, and medicine — including the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, JAMA, and the Lancet.