Meet the Team

OHE's exceptional team has strong expertise in the economics and statistics of health care provision and financing, the pricing and regulation of pharmaceuticals, and health technology assessment (HTA). Our experts have joined us from government, the life sciences industries, consultancies and academia. Supplementing our in-house expertise is an extensive network of health policy, economics and statistical experts based in the UK, Europe and around the world.

We emphasise activities that maintain the strength of our expertise, ensuring that both our research and consulting activities provide the best value possible. Each of our senior staff holds an academic appointment and we actively encourage our research and consultancy staff to publish and participate in conferences and seminars.

The OHE team are listed below:

Graham Cookson

Chief Executive

Professor Graham Cookson is the Chief Executive of the Office of Health Economics, taking over from Professor Adrian Towse who led OHE for 25 years.

Adrian Towse

Director Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow

Adrian’s current research includes incentives for new drugs and vaccines to tackle Antimicrobial Resistance, the use of 'risk-sharing' arrangements between health care payers and pharmaceutical companies, including value-based pricing approaches; the economics of pharmacogenetics for health care payers and the pharmaceutical industry; economic issues that affect both R&D for and access to treatments for diseases prevalent in the developing world.

Mireia Jofre-Bonet

Vice President & Head of Research

Mireia Jofre-Bonet is Head of Research and Vice President of the Office of Health Economics, replacing Professor Nancy Devlin.

Mireia is an economist specialised in health economics. She has worked on a broad spectrum of health Economics subjects including Lifestyle and Health Behaviour Decision Making; topics in Industrial Organisation applied to the Health Care sector and Pharmaceutical Regulation; Willingness To Pay for Health Insurance Schemes by the informal sector in low and middle income countries; Environmental factors and children’s health and wellbeing (domestic violence, maternal working hours; intergenerational transmission of health & behaviours); Adaptation to Health States; and, Migration and adaptation.

Lotte Steuten

Vice President & Head of Consulting

Professor Lotte Steuten is Head of Consulting and Vice President of the Office of Health Economics.

Lotte’s research interest focuses on the development and application of health economic analysis and health technology assessment (HTA), with the aim to accelerate patient access to high value health care services and treatments. She specializes in quantitative methods for estimating and comparing the expected health and economic benefits of new approaches and interventions in disease prevention, diagnostics and treatment, and prioritizing data collection to efficiently build the evidence for new interventions.

Eleanor Bell

Senior Economist

Eleanor joined the OHE in 2019 from studying at UCL, where she received the highest overall grade and highest dissertation mark of any masters level student in 2019 for her MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science. She also holds a Graduate Diploma in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Oxford. She has five years of experience as a researcher and consultant working on a range of social development issues in low-income settings, including two years based in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Mikel Berdud

Senior Principal Economist

Mikel’s current research interests are the economics of the pharmaceutical industry; including innovation and incentives for encouraging medical R&D, regulation of pharmaceutical markets and social welfare analysis, and competition and incentives for health care providers.

Simon Brassel

Principal Economist

Simon started working at the OHE in 2019 after completing (with Distinction) a MSc in Health Policy (Health Economics) from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) in 2018.

Amanda Cole

Senior Principal Economist

Amanda’s current research interests include the use of real world evidence to support HTA and product development; novel pricing and reimbursement mechanisms for pharmaceuticals (e.g. managed entry agreements and the economics of indication-based pricing); health state valuation methodology; criteria for the economic evaluation of health interventions; and the interaction between HTA policy and optimal R&D decisions by industry

Patricia Cubi-Molla

Senior Principal Economist

Patricia’s main areas of research are: health-related quality of life measures, subjective well-being, cost-effectiveness thresholds, estimation of health-related outcomes, health policy evaluation, adaptation to health states, ordered choice models and theory of preferences.

Charlotte Davies

Project Manager

Charlotte joined OHE at the end of 2018 to take up the new role of Project Manager. Her role involves the planning and smooth execution of OHE research projects as well as supporting the overall growth of OHE.

Isobel Firth

Senior Economist

Isobel joined OHE in 2020. She has an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences specialising in infectious diseases from the University of Cambridge and a Masters of Public Health (MPH) from Imperial College London. Her MPH research focussed on inequality in pharmaceutical innovation for infectious diseases and the impact of World Bank income classification on pharmaceutical innovation. She has completed internships at the World Health Organisation and Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) in Geneva where she worked on their Paediatric HIV and Hepatitis C programmes.

Martina Garau

Director

Martina’s current research includes economic issues posed by the development and provision of treatments for rare diseases; the economics of personalised medicine for health care payers and the pharmaceutical industry; and approaches to value based assessments.

Claire Green

Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive

Claire Green is the Personal Assistant to Chief Executive. A key aspect of her role is to provide time management and administrative support.

Grace Hampson

Associate Director

Grace’s areas of expertise include health technology appraisal, economic modelling and clinical guidelines. Grace is also interested in the economic evaluation of diagnostics and patient stratification, early stage modelling, and the economic evaluation of regenerative medicines and other high cost therapies. Grace has recently been appointed to NICE’s Clinical Guidelines Update Standing Committee, where she provides expert advice on the economic implications of NICE’s clinical guideline recommendations.

Nadine Henderson

Senior Economist

Nadine joined the OHE in October 2019 upon completing her MSc in Health Economics at the University of York. She conducted her dissertation research during a 3-month placement at the University of Technology Sydney; assessing whether the newly developed multi-attribute utility instrument EORTC QLU-C10D, is appropriate for use in primary brain cancer patients given the exclusion of a cognitive functioning scale.

Jake Hitch

Economist

Jake joined the OHE as an Economist in June 2021. He holds both a first in BSc Economics and a distinction in MRes Economics from the University of Bristol and based on his undergraduate performance he was awarded a prestigious Postgraduate Academic Excellence Award Scholarship. For his master’s dissertation Jake investigated the effects of mobile money on household food security and livestock transactions following large rainfall shocks in Tanzania.

Mike Herdman

Head of Health Outcomes Research

Mike brings with him extensive experience in psychometrics and in the development and validation of quality of life instruments. At OHE, he will be leading both consulting and research projects on health outcomes.

Dimitrios Kourouklis

Senior Economist

Dimitrios’ research interests lie in the fields of the economics of innovation and specifically on the economics of pharmaceutical markets and R&D, where he applies econometric methods to examine questions related to incentives for innovation. In addition, he is interested in topics at the intersection of health and applied economics.

Gayathri Kumar

Senior Economist

Gayathri joined OHE in 2020. She has had 7 years of industry experience in health technology assessment and market access. She holds an MSc in Economic Evaluation in Healthcare from City University, London and a BA in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

David Mott

Principal Economist

David's research interests broadly focus on the valuation of healthcare benefits. This includes describing health and valuing health states for the generation of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as well as the valuation and incorporation of broader outcomes (e.g. non-health outcomes or well-being) into the health technology assessment process.

Margherita Neri

Principal Economist

Margherita joined the OHE in December 2016 as Economist. Her work at the OHE has involved a number consulting projects, relating to different aspects of pharmaceutical R&D and HTA activities. She has experience in supporting the development of internal strategies for pharmaceutical companies in defining the value proposition of their pipeline (e.g. value frameworks) and the evidence generation processes during the product lifecycle.

Phill O’Neill

Head of Information and Analysis

Phill's research interests include the economics of the pharmaceutical market, the productivity and outputs of NICE, and benchmarking industry performance. He has extensive knowledge of, and experience with, data and other information used to understand the medicines market and performance of the pharmaceutical industry.

Jia Pan

OHE Fellow

Jia joined OHE in September 2020 as an OHE Fellow. She has a BSc in Economics from the University of Bristol and is undertaking an MSc in Health Economics at City University of London. Jia has previous experience within the healthcare management consulting industry and has worked for the NHS and pharmaceutical firms on product deployment and electronic health record (EHR) implementation projects.

Chris Sampson

Principal Economist

Chris’s primary research interest is economic evaluation in health care, including the development of new methods for cost-effectiveness analysis and the valuation of health. He has worked on trial- and model-based economic evaluations in a variety of clinical fields. Chris is also dedicated to building new platforms for collaboration in the discipline of health economics.

Hannah Schirrmacher

OHE Fellow

Hannah joined OHE in September 2020 as an OHE Fellow after completing a MSc in Development Economics at the University of Sussex. Her dissertation focused on investigating the effect of different government responses on COVID-19 deaths. Hannah has previously obtained a BSc in Economics from the University of Exeter and is currently undertaking an MSc in Health Economics at City, University of London. She gained exposure to research and public policy through a summer internship at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Kerry Sheppard

Business Executive

Kerry's responsibilities include maintaining the website, overseeing the production and publishing of in-house publications, organising events and serving as the contact point for accounts. Before joining the OHE in 2000, she was with the ABPI.

Chris Skedgel

Director

Chris has over 20 years of applied health economics experience in consulting and academia. His interests centre on the use of health economics to maximise the societal value of scarce healthcare resources, including the use of cost-effectiveness and cost-utility frameworks to evaluate value-for-money and stated preference methods to elicit patient and public values.

Leah Theakston

Team Assistant

Leah Theakston joined the OHE in December 2019 and provides administrative and logistical support to the team.

Leah has previously worked for Royal Mail and MCA in administrative roles and has a background in the arts and events.

Leah studied Philosophy and Fine Art and exhibits her artwork.