CHDS has awarded the annual Howard Raiffa Fund to global health and population doctoral candidate Annie Haakenstad. Haakenstad’s project will focus on improving students’ understanding of the technical and policy choices involved in resource allocation under multiple constraints. An interactive R Shiny tool based on a real-world example, the Global Fund’s Equitable Access Initiative will be developed and deployed in Advanced Modeling for Health System Analysis & Priority Setting (GHP 201). Interaction with the visualization will improve students’ understanding of: 1) how altering components of a constrained optimization model affects the allocation of financing, and 2) the tradeoffs involved in making resource allocation policy. Haakenstad will be supervised by Dr. Stéphane Verguet.
In 2018, the Fund awarded health policy doctoral candidates Zach Ward and Jinyu Zhu. Ward worked with Dr. Eve Wittenberg and Zhu with Dr. Ankur Pandya.
Ward designed and pilot tested tutorials and case studies to accompany the open-source decision analytic software he created. Products were created with support from the CHDS Media Hub and its lead, Jake Waxman.
Zhu developed application cases and visualization tools to complement teaching in the HSPH decision science curriculum.
About the Award
The Howard Raiffa Fund was established in 1996 at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis through the generosity of many donors wishing to honor Howard Raiffa, one of the true ‘founding fathers’ of decision science. The Fund supports the training of scholars pursuing doctoral studies in decision and risk analysis and is administered by CHDS annually. Following Raiffa’s model of engaged mentorship, awardees work closely with a CHDS faculty member in planning and implementing projects of their own design.
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