Raiffa Award Recipients Announced

CHDS has awarded the 2020 Howard Raiffa Fund to health policy doctoral candidates John Giardina and Fangli Geng. Giardina’s project will focus on analyzing recent advances in personalized and precision medicine in the context of decision science in order to (1) highlight key contributions decision science can make in the development of individualized care techniques, and (2) create new educational materials that conceptualize the value or harms of individualized care using basic decision analytic tools. Giardina will be supervised by Sue Goldie. Geng’s project will focus on conducting a landscape exercise of health technology assessment across the world, including typologies, scope, variation in methods used, resources, and involvement of stakeholders. The materials will be used for the development of a teaching session called “The use of decision science methods by HTA agencies across the world” to complement teaching in Economic Evaluation for Health Policy & Program Management (RDS 282). Geng will be supervised by Stephen Resch.

In 2019, the Fund awarded global health and population doctoral candidate Annie Haakenstad. Haakenstad developed an interactive R Shiny tool to improve students’ understanding of the technical and policy choices involved in resource allocation under multiple constraints to complement teaching in Advanced Modeling for Health System Analysis & Priority Setting (GHP 201). Haakenstad worked with Stéphane Verguet.

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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