OHE Announces New Trustees and Board Chair

As Professor Mike Drummond and Professor Bengt Jonnson step down from the OHE Board of Trustees after more than a decade of service, OHE announces the appointment of Professor Margaret Kyle and Professor Werner Brouwer as replacements with Professor Anita Charlesworth becoming chair

As Professor Mike Drummond and Professor Bengt Jonnson step down from the OHE Board of Trustees after more than a decade of service, OHE announces the appointment of Professor Margaret Kyle and Professor Werner Brouwer as replacements with Professor Anita Charlesworth becoming chair.

In December, we announced that Professor Mike Drummond and Professor Bengt Jonnson were stepping down from the OHE Board of Trustees after more than a decade of service.

OHE is pleased to welcome two leading academics to the Board of Trustees. OHE Chief Executive, Professor Graham Cookson says, “We’re delighted to welcome Professors Kyle and Brouwer, two distinguished academics in their field, to the Board. They are real thought leaders blending heavyweight research credentials with experience advising national and European governments on health and life sciences policy, which is core to OHE’s mission.”

Professor Margaret Kyle is Professor of Economics and holder of the Chair in Markets for Technology and Intellectual Property at MINES ParisTech.

She is widely recognised as a global expert on innovation, productivity, and competition. She has numerous papers examining R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the role of geographic and academic spillovers; the firm-specific and policy determinants of the diffusion of new products; generic competition; and the use of markets for technology.

Her recent work examines the effect of trade and IP policies on the level, location, and direction of R&D investment and competition. She also works on issues of innovation and access to therapies in developing countries.

As you would expect from such an eminent scholar, her work has been published in leading journals across economics, strategy, and health policy, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Management Science, and Health Affairs to name only a few.

Professor Kyle holds a PhD in economics from MIT and is an associate editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization. She previously held positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, London Business School, and the Toulouse School of Economics, and is a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The impact of Professor Kyle’s work extends beyond the academy. Her work informs countries and companies. She is a member of DG Competition’s Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy. She is one of eleven independent academic economists advising the French Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Affairs on the country’s productivity and competitiveness.

And most importantly of all – she currently serves on the Research Committee for the Office of Health Economics. From January, Professor Kyle will also become Chair of the Research Committee.

Professor Werner Brouwer is a Professor of Health Economics and the Dean of the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

His research focuses on the methodology of welfare economic evaluations in health care covering topics like optimal decision rules, normative foundations of economic evaluations in health, measurement and valuation of informal care and productivity costs, incorporating equity considerations in economic evaluations as well as the monetary value of health gains. His research also extends into broader topics such as the link between economic evaluation and health policy, behavioural economics, and public health economics.

He has published extensively on these topics including in leading field journals like Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Medical Decision Making, Social Science & Medicine and British Medical Journal.

Professor Brouwer holds an MSc in Economics (1996) and a PhD in Health Economics (1999) from Erasmus and is an Honorary University Professor at the Corvinus University in Budapest, Hungary. Werner is also affiliated with the institute for Medical Technology Assessment and the Erasmus School of Economics. Werner is an Associate Editor of Health Economics and a member of the Editorial Boards of the European Journal of Health Economics, PharmacoEconomics and Cost-Effectiveness and Resource Allocation.

He is also a member of the European Commission Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health and the independent chairman of the Foundation for Top Clinical Mental Health Care (TOPGGz) and chairs the Erasmus Initiative Smarter Choices for Better Health of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

We hope to be able to announce our third new Trustee shortly.

New Chair of Trustees

We are also pleased to announce that one of our existing Trustees, Professor Anita Charlesworth CBE, will be taking over as Chair of Trustees effective 1^st January 2022.

Anita has been a Trustee of the Office of Health Economics since June 2019 and is currently Chair of the OHE Policy Committee, making significant contributions across both roles. Graham Cookson OHE’s Chief Executive said:

“It’s been a great pleasure to work with Anita over the past two years and the combination – across all three sectors – of skills and experience she brings is exceptionally rare. We’re fortunate to be able to work even more closely with Anita as OHE celebrates its 60^th anniversary.”

Anita is the Director of Research and the REAL Centre (Research and Economic Analysis for the Long term) at the Health Foundation, and Honorary Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the Health Services Management Centre (HSMC) at the University of Birmingham.

She is a health economist with an extensive background in government and public policy. Before joining the Health Foundation, she was Chief Economist at the Nuffield Trust from 2010–14, and previously had roles as Chief Analyst and Chief Scientific Advisor at DCMS (2007–10), Director of Public Spending at the Treasury (1998–2007) and worked as an Economic Advisor at the Department of Health and for SmithKline Beecham pharmaceuticals.

Anita is also Trustee for Tommy’s, the baby charity, and alongside her deep professional experience she brings significance experience in the management and governance of charities.

Welcoming the new Trustees, OHE’s new Chair Anita Charlesworth said:

“I am delighted to be taking over as chair of the OHE – Professor Mike Drummond will be a very hard act to follow.  The last two years have reminded us all of the critical importance of health services and innovation.  OHE has an outstanding team of researchers with an excellent track record of work in this area.  I am looking forward to working with Professors Kyle and Brouwer to support OHE as it continues to improve knowledge and understanding of health systems and innovation.  The applied translational work they champion has never been more important.”