The following initiatives comprise the foundation of the proposed research agenda. We aim for research findings to be translated into policy recommendations with measurable outcomes for evaluation.

  • Tracking and analyzing resources invested in global health and evaluating their effectiveness for improving medical care coverage and health outcomes among the vulnerable populations (e.g., young children, adolescents, people with mental disorders)
  • Understanding household financial burden for paying for health care or early care and learning and their associated socioeconomic inequalities in low- and middle-income countries
  • Conducting economic evaluation on health care financing mechanisms (e.g., community-based health insurance, cash transfer) or other type of interventions (e.g., training community health workers for delivering child, maternal, and mental care ) that aim at reducing health inequality and achieving universal health coverage in resource-limited settings
  • Developing data, measures, statistical methods, and survey tools to facilitate global health  research
    1. Estimating the prevalence of young children exposed to risk factors of poor early development and its socioeconomic inequalities at the global-, regional-, and country-level
    2. Understanding the effects of survey design on estimating catastrophic health spending using household surveys and developing statistical algorithm to address the related measurement errors  
    3. Exploring methods for integrating equity into cost-effective analysis
  • Generating new frameworks for modeling interactions between infectious diseases and economics
    This work is based on the integration of a range of mathematical methods developed by epidemiologists, infectious disease ecologists, mathematicians, and economists. These models are applied to data from health care initiatives from the sites where we work.